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The Open Door 



THE WORKS of 
HUGH BLACK 

THE FRIENDSHIP SERIES 

Friendship 
Work 
Comfort 
Happiness 



* According to My Gospel n 
The Open Door 
Culture and Restraint 
Listening to God 
Christ's Service of Love 
The Gift of Influence 



The Open Door 



By 
HUGH BLACK 




New York Chicago Toronto 

Fleming H. Revell Company 

London and Edinburgh 



Copyright, 1914, by 
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 



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New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
Chicago: 125 North Wabash Ave. 
Toronto: 25 Richmond Street, W. 
London: 21 Paternoster Square 
Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street 

NOV -7 1914 
©CU387385 



Contents 

I. The Open Door . 

II. The Laws of the Open Door 

III. The Shut Door . 

IV. The Doorways of Tradition 

V. The Magic Door . 

VI. The Lure of the Open Door 

VII. The Door of Opportunity . 

VIII. The Adventure of the Open 

Door .... 

IX. The Last Open Door , 



7 
29 

55 
79 

127 
155 

181 

203 



The Open Door 



Arc there not, Festus, are there not, dear Michal, 
Two points in the adventure of the diver, 
One — when, a beggar, he prepares to plunge, 
One — when, a prince, he rises with his pearl ? 
Festus, I plunge! 

— Robert Browning. 



THE OPEN DOOR 



cK <F*— 


^ JU 



HE purpose of this book is 
to suggest a certain attitude 
towards the world and life. 
The common figure of speech, 
" The Open Door," chosen for 
the title, indicates this general attitude. It ex- 
presses the spirit of hope with which we may 
face the future in every region of human 
endeavour. Man has not exhausted his ex- 
periences. The universe has not ended its 
experiments. There are no impassable limits 
anywhere. When we think we have charted 
the complete region and have found the con- 
fines, there is a way out into something bigger, 
an open door into a larger world. 

In every age man thinks he has about reached 
the limits and begins to make a snug nest for 
himself in a world which he understands — 
when he finds the limits are stretched and he 

9 



io The Open Door 

must readjust himself to a larger environment. 
We like incidents that are closed, and condi- 
tions that are settled, and subjects whose bound- 
aries are fixed. But we discover that nothing 
will remain closed, and settled, and fixed. We 
think of situations, and we find that there are 
not any such, but only movements. We learn 
— or we should learn — that we are living in a 
world where nothing is static. 

At first this is disquieting. When we would 
settle down, with our thinking done, with 
our religion fixed, with our social conditions 
permanent, with everything pigeonholed and 
orderly, we are indignant or distressed that 
we are not left in peace. Some new knowl- 
edge or new experience demands that our 
thinking be done over again, or that our relig- 
ious propositions be revised, or that our indus- 
trial and social conditions be amended. Soon 
we realize that this is our hope, instead of our 
despair. It makes for courage to see that new 
knowledge is always open to us, and new ex- 
periences are always in store for us, and new 
conditions are always possible to us. The mood 
that suits the fact is one of faith and expect- 



The Open Door n 

ancy. The door is ever open to the sons of 
man. 

We used to think of the world in terms of 
statics. It was looked on as a hard inert mass 
which shaped us and which we could do little 
to shape. If we did not submit to let it shape 
us it would break us, the poor pigmies of earth. 
The world was a rigid thing with fixed bound- 
aries. It was stationary, with definite laws. 
Our only part was to learn these laws and 
submit to them like the inflexible rules of a 
game. We could do nothing to them except 
submit, and if we did not submit they did 
definite things to us. 

There was, above all, a very solid and rigid 
thing called matter. Dr. Johnston's argument 
against an idealistic philosophy consisted of 
stamping his solid foot on the ground, and 
common sense everywhere felt that he had 
triumphantly disposed of the question. Now 
even the solid ground is falling away from 
such solid feet. Matter itself is no longer 
being viewed as rigid mass. Science has grad- 
ually been analyzing it, first into molecules and 
atoms, but to older science the atom was itself 



12 The Open Door 

a rigid thing like infinitesimal bullets by which 
was built up the substantial universe. Newer 
science carries the analysis further to aeons 
and electrons, and all modern speculation and 
investigation go frankly on the theory that 
the constitution of matter is electrical. There 
seems nothing rigid and stable and stationary 
in all the universe. 

We are thus learning to think of the world, 
not in terms of statics, but in terms of dynam- 
ics. Everywhere we are touching not dead, 
inert mass, but living, moving force. Every- 
where we are dealing with something pliable 
and plastic, with frontiers that shift and that 
can be shifted. The world we inhabit is not 
a rigid thing with changeless boundaries and 
fixed limits. The mind of man does encounter 
limits in every region where it pushes, but the 
limits are not always the same. Indeed they 
are not limits to the world, but limits to the 
mind of man. Ever there appears an open door 
leading out, so that a portion of the unknown 
gets swept into the confines of the known. 

It is so much easier for us to deal with the 



The Open Door 13 

static, that we never are cured of our heresy of 
treating things as if they "stayed put." When 
some new wonder of the living universe comes 
to us we are disturbed for a time, but at last 
reach peace by classifying it and putting it 
away as a new fact in our museum. But the 
world is not fixed like a museum, though we 
are always tempted to treat it so. We think 
the account is closed, and have handy little 
compartments to stow away things. We have 
a scheme of things which we call the natural, 
and if we allow anything else we call it the su- 
pernatural. The natural is usually conceived 
of as a fixed domain with no open doors out 
from it. 

At every stage of human life there is the bare 
crude fact, the solid basis of experience, the 
things we know and count on. Above that is 
the unattained, which the ordinary man thinks 
is also the unattainable. As a matter of fact 
the level is always shifting. When a new ex- 
perience takes place or new facts are learned, 
the hitherto impossible becomes possible and at 
last becomes commonplace. It gets its place in 
our museum. We accept the new level of ex- 



14 The Open Door 

perience as a matter of course and try to get 
things stable and stationary once more. We 
have even a definite picture of what we call the 
" real world," and all else is treated as vision- 
ary, until we can deny it no longer. 

When the telephone was invented, most men 
found it hard to conceive that it could even be 
possible to speak a thousand miles so as to rec- 
ognize the very tones of a friend's voice. If an 
eager believer spoke of it, he was told that was 
not the real world but a dreamer's idea of the 
actual. The actual was what we knew, and we 
knew that it had never been done. I will 
never forget the thrill when I received my first 
marconigram five hundred miles from land, and 
I realized that wireless telegraphy had become 
an established fact in the world. Ocean-goers 
now send and receive messages as a matter of 
course, and have got back to their static uni- 
verse. When wireless telegraphy was first 
spoken of, men smiled at the absurdity, as if it 
were either a practical joke or the madness of 
a dreamer. It did not belong to the real world. 

What is the real world ? Is it the world as 
men thought of it yesterday, or as we think of 



"The Open Door 15 

it to-day, or as it will be viewed to-morrow ? 
Our habit of treating it as something fixed 
seems almost incurable. In most ages the 
world has been for man like a prison, ample 
and roomy even with pleasure grounds at- 
tached, but still a prison. If he goes far 
enough in any direction he comes to a hard 
stone wall, against which he will only hurt him- 
self if he butts his head. To much ancient 
wisdom the one secret of happiness is for a man 
to learn the limits and keep carefully within 
them. It is as old as Ecclesiastes to say that it 
is a mistake to be over-wise, or for that part 
over-righteous. 

Everything in our day which has compelled 
us to reconstruct our intellectual life was here 
in every previous day. Man never invents any- 
thing : he can only discover. An invention is 
merely the application of a discovery. To dis- 
cover is simply to disclose what actually is. 
Electricity, radioactivity, X-rays, were in the 
world always. The forces which men are now 
harnessing and using have ever been here, only 
there were no men with knowledge enough to 
appreciate the fact. "Who can set limits to 



16 The Open Door 

what is ? Who can draw a line and declare 
that within it lies all that is possible ? Who 
can say what forces there are unknown, one 
day it may be to be utilized by the sons of 
men ? The world is not one definite thing, but 
is whatever we men, with knowledge and cour- 
age and faith, are able to make it. When we 
reach the borders, there is ever an open door 
into a larger place. The world is just as big 
as we are big enough to inhabit. 

Like all true things this is not completely 
new. We have always known it in other re- 
gions. iEsthetically the world is to each what 
he is able to appreciate. How different a single 
scene may appear to different views, since the 
eye sees what capacity and knowledge and 
training give it the power to see. As an Amer- 
ican naturalist put it, you must have the bird 
in your heart before you can see it in the bush. 
Buttercups and daisies, the common flowers of 
the field, may be a delight to a child and a 
nuisance to a farmer. A single flower is one 
thing to a botanist, another to an artist, another 
to a market-gardener, and another to a lover. 



"The Open Door 17 

William Blake the poet and artist said in his 
old age to a little girl, " My dear, may God 
make this world as beautiful to you as it has 
been to me." 

Kecently, looking at a picture in front of the 
landscape it depicted, I asked the artist if he 
saw all that colour on that hillside, and he re- 
plied, " For years I have lived with and loved 
that hill, and every year I see new colour in it." 
His eyes were sharpened by knowledge and 
sympathy. To uncultured eyes there are only 
a few crude colours and a general dull gray 
tone. There is a true sense in which it may be 
said that we make our own world. Every 
common thing may be viewed, according to the 
angle of vision, in a hundred different lights. 
Life itself, which to one man is the dullest 
prose, may be to another a country of romance. 
To one there are no surprises of beauty, and not 
even anything new, only the accustomed scene. 
To another there is a new world born every 
new day. 

If this is true in regions like those of science 
and of art, it is also true morally and spiritually. 
Two boys may grow up in the same town, in 



18 The Open Door 

the same street, even in the same house, and 
inhabit two different moral worlds. The out- 
look on life determines the life. To one man 
there are no far horizons, no stainless peaks, no 
adventures of the soul. To another life is a 
house of many mansions, and the doors are ever 
open. Intellectually, as we saw, the world is 
the product of forces, which if we discover we 
can manipulate and use, and knowledge means 
pushing back the frontier. Morally, also, life is 
the product of forces, which also need to be ap- 
prehended and applied. 

Life to most of us is made up almost entirely 
of custom and tradition. It has hardened into 
set forms, so that it is no longer flexible. This 
is why there are so often those periods of lull 
in the history of human progress which daunt 
the heart of its champions. It is so hard to get 
men to see where the door is open, and harder 
to get them to attempt the entry. They pre- 
fer to settle back on the accustomed, and refuse 
the risk of change. Progress everywhere is 
checked because we are so ready to get back to 
the static. It is not easy to remain accessible to 
new views or tenets, and to keep free from preju- 



The Open Door 19 

dice. So also in the region of morality it is 
difficult to keep the heights which the soul is 
competent to gain, until at last it becomes diffi- 
cult even to believe that there are heights at all. 
True education means keeping the passage- 
way clear. The biggest thing we can do for 
another is simply to open a door, or rather to 
show him where the door is open, out to a 
larger knowledge, a broader sympathy, a fuller 
life. This alone is education, not spoon-feeding 
with information, but deepening the insight 
and widening the outlook. In the growth and 
development of a child, we see how doors begin 
to open as life goes on. The world seems to 
press in by every avenue, claiming attention, 
enticing to adventure. It acts through ear-gate 
and eye-gate and touch-gate, through the gates 
of the senses and then the sensibilities, through 
the emotions and the mind, through the imagina- 
tion and the heart and all the gifts of man's 
great nature. Life is the opening of doors into 
this rich world of God's and man's. 

Too soon we let the sense of wonder die, and 
we lose the very attitude of expectancy which 



20 The Open Door 

makes us use opportunity when it comes. We 
do not let life lead us into the further ways 
even when we possess opportunity. For ex- 
ample, the mastery of a new language should 
mean gaining entrance into a new world of 
thought and experience. To many, however, a 
foreign tongue is an end in itself and not a 
means — a discipline only and not an open door 
leading out to new scenery. This cripples 
much of our education. The schoolboy reads 
Csesar as a task and rarely is taught to look 
upon it as a book, to introduce him to a new 
world, all the more new that it is so old. 

Similarly, a new experience should open the 
way to a larger life. It should bring fresh in- 
sight, and wider interest, and keener sympathy. 
Many do not use the new experience, but only 
enjoy it. A great happiness will sometimes 
come to a man and he will rejoice in it, 
but yet he may not let it enlarge his life. 
Strangely enough we sometimes find it only 
narrowing him. So a sorrow, which we would 
expect to soften and deepen, will often only 
harden and embitter. We do not always 
learn the true lesson of the Open Door. We 



The Open Door 21 

forget that we are pilgrims of the way, whose 
experiences should enrich. An experience is 
not merely something that we have to pass 
through, but something that should remain with 
us as one of the spoils of life. 

A new idea, also, ought to unlock a door 
where the whole horizon is broadened. The 
idea will come to many, at last indeed is pre- 
sented in some shape to all, but not all treat it 
alike. Some meet the new idea only to be 
afraid of it and oppose it. Others receive it 
hospitably, but only to add it as another fact, 
like adding a rare kind of beetle to a collection. 
It ought to be a key to open the gates to a 
richer comprehension. 

The history of the idea of evolution gives 
ample illustration of all these attitudes. Many 
met it with fear, and opposed it with hatred, 
and tried to kill it with cheap ridicule. Some 
examined the proof of it candidly and accepted 
it as a further fact. Fewer still were willing 
to follow its leading into the wonderful and 
beautiful world to which it led. Even now we 
do not candidly and courageously accept its 
implications. It is too dynamic for the static 



22 The Open Door 

universe we love to conceive ourselves as in- 
habiting. It shatters too many illusions and 
compels too radical a reconstruction of our 
intellectual world. We use it to trace out the 
past, and find it handy for explaining history, 
but we will not apply it to our fundamental 
thinking. Our philosophical and theological 
and political and social systems might be dis- 
integrated too swiftly, if such dynamite were 
put under them. Yet more and more men are 
learning that nowhere in the universe is there 
dead mass but everywhere living force. They 
turn to the future with the outlook of hope, as 
night-watchers turn to the red dawn. 

Socially, also, this attitude of outlook is 
necessary for a noble and progressive com- 
munal life. We see a door open, where before 
there seemed none. Opportunity emerges for 
juster laws, and cleaner environment, and finer 
life for all. Among the signs of our time, for 
instance, there is the new Peace movement. 
This generation seriously proposes the abolition 
of war. Some see the vision and take a share 
in creating public sentiment about it. Of course 



The Open Door 23 

we are told it cannot be done, as the same kind 
of man said the same thing about duelling. 
Some assume that it is an impossible dream 
that cannot apply to the real world. What is 
the real world, anyway, to which they refer? 
If we got an answer to that question, we would 
find that they were ignorant of the actual 
forces which are beginning to dominate the 
world of modern human life. We would find 
that they do not know what modern democracy 
means, and take no thought of its dynamic 
influence as a spiritual motive. 

The whole Democratic movement of our 
time is an open door to all the brave hearts 
that recognize it as the dawning of a better 
day. Many fear it and many condemn, some 
surely because they misunderstand and mis- 
judge it. It is easy to criticize a great world- 
movement by fastening on incidental weak- 
nesses. It is easy to make it ludicrous by 
speaking of getting wisdom by counting noses. 
Democracy does not mean that, nor does it 
mean a monotonous dead level of equality. It 
means faith in essential humanity, the opening 
of doors to all who can enter. Its ideal is a 



24 The Open Door 

world of persons, each able to make the full 
contribution of his whole personality to the 
world. We should rejoice that the way is 
being cleared for a juster state of society and 
for true cooperation. 

It may be false, but will you wish it true ? 
Has it your vote to be so if it can ? 

There are always doubters and tremblers and 
followers of tradition, who tell us of all the 
difficulties, the lions in the path. There are 
defenders of every social order as sacred, who 
dread change. In every region of thought and 
activity we are almost strangled by the incubus 
of tradition, till we are tempted or forced to 
shake it off, and at last move to the lure of the 
Open Door. 

In our own day the forces of reaction have 
been weakened by so many shocks that there 
is even a danger of false hope, though any kind 
of hope is better than indifference or despair. 
There is a thrill of expectancy in the air, which 
makes this age an intensely interesting one in 
which to live. Of course dangers attend this 



The Open Door 25 

attitude. Men become impatient of old posi- 
tions, and despair of exact thinking, and let the 
emotional swamp the intellectual. Instead of 
a reasoned faith they sometimes substitute a 
mushy optimism, with no groundwork of ex- 
perience and no basis of fact. The expectancy 
of our time is the fruit of the changes that 
have already taken place, and the changes in 
turn create a new expectancy. We may be 
tempted to hasten the speed unduly or to make 
rash experiments. Every thoughtful observer 
knows that we have a vast program ahead of 
us. Even to the most casual eye the race is on 
the threshold of change greater than any yet 
known. 

One danger is to lose grip of fact and to 
assume that change spells progress. Human 
life cannot live permanently up in the air. We 
need to gather and conserve our gains, and we 
cannot afford to let go the painfully achieved 
treasures of past experience. We must keep 
our feet on fact. To live in a state of gaseous 
uplift only invites the certain shock of the 
down-drop. We may have cause to believe 
that the constitution of matter is electrical, 



26 The Open Door 

but mass remains as a fact of experience and 
the earth still remains a pretty solid thing 
to fall on. The open door to man does not 
mean that nothing is closed. It does not mean 
that anybody can move anywhere unimpeded. 
There are laws that condition entry and that 
allow no exceptions. The most hopeless mood 
is the weak optimism that shuts the eyes to facts. 
Another danger is that some eager souls 
may think that the promised land is just round 
the corner, and when disappointed of this 
hope may be too sorely disillusioned. They 
have not calculated the strength of the op- 
posing forces and the inertia of human nature. 
Knowledge of the past should inform them 
of some of the inevitable obstacles, and should 
prepare them for some of the repulses and the 
patient waiting which the champions of prog- 
ress must suffer. On the other hand, knowl- 
edge of the past should bring encouragement, 
as we look back over the long way by which 
we have come. The restless seeking of man 
has ever led him out into a larger place, and it 
would be craven of us to turn back from the 
long passion. Darkness has been dissipated by 



The Open Door 27 

light, ignorance has given way before knowl- 
edge, apathy has blossomed into love, and 
the redemption is nearer than when we first 
believed. 

What should the parable of the Open Door 
mean to us but courage and hope ? The true 
mood is that of adventure. There is a high 
and noble curiosity, allied to courage, which 
has blazed the trail for others. This eager 
seeking of the soul has been responsible for all 
the gains of the race. We are saved by hope. 
To know that there is something unattained 
and to believe that it is not therefore unattain- 
able has been the lode-star to progress. On 
the whole we fail in moral courage, we do not 
believe enough, and do not expect enough. We 
look back with admiration on periods when 
human life has flowered. We see times when 
a group of men have been quickened and have 
laid the world under eternal debt by the beauty 
and strength of their thought. Height called 
to height and deep replied to deep, and mind 
and soul caught flame and spread it, and the 
miracle of life happened. Even in a single 



28 The Open Door 

city why should we never expect again the fer- 
ment of mind which produced the Athens of 
Socrates and the Florence of Dante and the 
London of Shakespeare ? The world has ever 
been saved by the kingly men who have made 
adventure of soul, carrying the freight of the 
spirit. 

We look through the long vista of doors that 
have been opened in the past and take courage 
for the venture of our day of opportunity. 
Amid the flux and flow of circumstance, 
through the changes of history, over the long 
road of the ascent of life, we see the unfolding 
of purpose. The past exists for the future, and 
we can believe that the future will explain the 
past and justify the present. The door stands 
open wide. 

A fire-mist and a planet, — 

A crystal and a cell, — 

A jelly-fish and a saurian, 

And caves where the cave-men dwell ; 

Then a sense of law and beauty, 

And a face turned from the clod, — 

Some call it Evolution, 

And others call it God. 



II 



The Laws of the Open Door 



It is fit things be stated and considered as they are. 

— Bishop Butler. 



II 



THE LAWS OF THE OPEN DOOR 




NE of the most potent in- 
fluences of our time that has 
made for change is the relax- 
ing of authority. We see it 
everywhere, in education, in 
religion, in the family, and in the state. It is 
evident in every region both of thought and of 
practical life. The breakdown of authority is 
the natural result of the breakdown of static 
conditions. Nowhere can we appeal with the 
old dogmatism to established traditions, and to 
truths delivered once for all in changeless form. 
The world has broken away from its moorings. 
The point of view suggested by our figure of 
the Open Door acts like an acid to disintegrate 
all fixed systems. If we learn to look at the 
world and life in terms of dynamics and no 
longer in terms of statics, we are done with 
immutability anywhere. 
We frankly recognize the dangers of the very 



32 "The Open Door 

mood we are encouraging in this book. It un- 
doubtedly means the weakening of old au- 
thority, and there are places where a blind step 
may mean a step into the abyss. The first les- 
son surely is that our steps should not be blind. 
It is sometimes assumed that this doctrine of 
the Open Door means that there are no pen- 
alties, and that all we need to do is to move 
gaily forward making any kind of experiment 
in life without risk. If we walk up confidently 
to any obstacle it will obligingly remove itself, 
and when we come to a stubborn barrier a way 
through opens up as by magic. We must learn 
that there is nothing magical in the world, that 
this is not a casual but a causal universe. 

The problem is that human life must have 
some sort of authority on which it can rest and 
build. How to get it, if everywhere we are 
touching moving force and never dead mass ? 
If everything changes and we change with it, 
if reality is like a stream and we are in the 
stream, where can we find anything which we 
can call permanent ? Well, we must frankly 
build on experience, and if it needs faith to be- 
lieve that experience itself is not illusion, we 



The Laws of the Open Door 33 

are compelled to exercise that faith. This is 
necessary for sane life. 

The first law of the Open Door may be called 
the law of faith. Fundamentally it means 
trust in the sanity and order and purposiveness 
of the universe. Without this faith, we are 
appalled at the littleness of man before the 
greatness of the world's forces. Man is crushed 
by a sense of insignificance. We with our 
larger knowledge of infinite space feel even 
more awed than the ancient poet who looked 
up into the eastern sky at night and said, 

When I behold Thy heavens, the work of Thy 
fingers, 

The moon and the stars which Thou didst es- 
tablish, 

What is man that Thou art mindful of him, 

And the son of man that Thou visitest him ? 

Modern man feels even more acutely the con- 
trast between the worm man and the armies of 
the sky. Only a sense of spiritual values, only 
faith in the worth of man's life, can swing back 
the balance from despair. 

The sea is very large and our boat is very 



34 The Open Door 

small, but the boat fits the sea. It can be made 
to sail. The laws and facts of the sea can be 
harnessed to serve the purposes of the boat. 
Indeed the biggest fact of the sea is the fact of 
the boat. The boat is at the mercy of the sea, 
but is also the sea's master and dominates it for 
human ends. The universe is unfathomable, 
full of mystery, cruel in its impassiveness, and 
human life with its history and achievements is 
very weak and small. It is like a speck on the 
vast ocean. But the biggest fact of the world 
is the fact of man. He alone is conscious of 
the contrast between the puny single species 
and the majesty of the whole. 

Pascal describes man feeble as a reed which 
it does not need the universe to crush. " But 
he is a reed that thinks, and were the whole 
universe to crush him he is above that which 
destroys him ; for he knows that he dies and 
that which crushes him knows nothing." If 
only to keep the gains of the past, man is com- 
pelled to believe in himself. He must believe 
that he has a destiny, as he has a history. Man 
alone is conscious of his history, and can look 
back over the long way with pride. There 



The Laws of the Open Door 35 

seems to be meaning and purpose in that ro- 
mantic story. Nowhere do we see human life 
in a hopeless cuL-de-sac — a blind alley without 
outlet. Somewhere it issues out into a larger 
place. Somewhere a door opens to further ex- 
perience and fuller life. To deny such a future 
is to put a full stop to the story. Without this 
faith, life would be a torso, whose general ap- 
pearance is uncommonly like a grotesque. 

Is it all for nothing that man has striven and 
suffered ? Is it all for nothing that the race has 
endured its long agony, and thrilled to its noble 
joys ? Have all the triumphs of man's history, 
his deepening self-knowledge, his progressive 
control of natural forces, his social achievements 
in building up a rational communal life, been 
only nothing better than illusion ? Man will 
never believe that, or when he does it will be at 
last the race-suicide. As he looks back he thinks 
he sees doors opening leading ever to the light, 
and he believes that he will not come to a place 
where there is no passage. If ever he comes 
where there is no passage that way, he feels 
sure that there is a passage some other way. 

All a brave man needs is this simple faith that 



36 The Open Door 

he is not in a hopeless cul-de-sac, that he will not 
die like a rat in a hole. Even if he die, his 
death will count for something, as he thinks his 
life counted for something. Let him see that 
spot of blue where invites the open door, and 
he can withstand in the evil day and having 
done all can still stand. All he asks for is the 
wages of going on. Sometimes faith is only 
another name for courage, in which man takes 
life in his hand as he makes the great venture. 

The first law of the Open Door then is the 
law of faith. We believe that the door is open, 
and that it is open for us. We can win through, 
if we will. We can trust the world, and life, 
and self, and the future. The religious man 
means all this when he says we can trust God. 
The universe may be a riddle as it has 
often been called, but the riddle of the 
universe is at least not a farce. We must 
trust the world, in order to live. We must be- 
lieve that the world has meaning and purpose 
at its core, in order to live a man's life. This 
fundamental faith carries with it faith in the 
future. We may not know — we do not know 
— anything but that a clear road invites our 



"The Laws of the Open Door 37 

feet. We do not need to know any more than 
that. Indeed, it is part of the attraction of life 
that it should come to us as an adventure. 

The world has been lifted forward by the 
goodly succession of adventurers, who went forth 
not knowing whither they went. Columbus 
putting a theory to the test finds a new world. 
The astronomer, working out a hypothesis, 
sees a new planet swim into his ken. Men of 
science extend the bounds of knowledge in a 
spirit of adventure. Teachers are content if at 
last they find students, into whose hands they 
can put the torch to carry it on and it may be 
to light other flames. The task of education, 
and its glory, is not merely to transmit knowl- 
edge and build up an intellectual system of dis- 
cipline, but to inspire, and to kindle a flame 
which will illumine the path for all the world. 
We look far through time to get the distant in- 
terest of all true investment. All education 
worth the name has a spiritual source, and a 
spiritual end. It lives by vision, and works 
through insight and outlook, lifting the eyes to 
wider horizons. 

" The door is open," said the ancient stoic. 



38 The Open Door 

He meant that there was a way of escape from 
intolerable fate. His unconquerable soul had 
always a last refuge. When things got to the 
worst, when he could stand no more, when the 
burden grew too heavy and life had become in- 
sufferable, the door was open. He meant in a 
plain word, Suicide. There was a way out 
from under the burden, a way down and out. 
It is the refuge of despair, a pagan solution of 
the problem of life. The fact that so often 
men and women of our day find easy recourse 
to the same way of escape is proof that there 
are still pagan elements in our modern society. 
Set over against that despairing word the same 
word interpreted by faith, " The door is open." 
It becomes a word of hope and courage and 
comfort and power. Instead of a way down 
and out, there is a way up and out 

This is the message of religion, if the implica- 
tions of faith are frankly accepted. It should 
issue in peace and hope and joy. Too often 
religion is treated as narrow and cramping, 
something that will dwarf our powers, and im- 
prison us, and cut off our rightful joy. It is 
looked on as if it would hamper life, and narrow 



The Laws of the Open Door 39 

it down into a small corner. Whereas, it is the 
biggest and widest thing that can come into a 
man's life, ennobling every faculty and glorify- 
ing every power. It should lead a man out 
into a large place, till he feels he is standing in 
the Supreme Will, so that with a pure heart he 
can serve his generation e'er he too fall on 
sleep. 

Take as illustration the obvious open door 
before this generation of social and industrial 
reconstruction. It is natural that there should 
be some timidity before a great change, even 
when we recognize that the change is inev- 
itable. Some allow their fears to swallow up 
their courage, till the only forward look they 
have is one of dread. Others of the privileged 
classes harden their hearts in selfish possession, 
determined to resist to the last all that seems 
to disturb their comfort. There is a new order 
to be born out of the new stirrings of life, and 
in what temper should it be met ? Surely in 
that of faith, which not only believes that the 
change will result in better conditions, but also 
which believes that because it believes in man. 
It sees that the civilization which does not 



40 The Open Door 

afford its members the opportunity to become 
their best selves is a failure. It believes that 
as of old God is calling His sons out of Egypt, 
and that the way to the Promised Land will 
open, though it be through the sea and the 
desert. 

For our comfort in facing the change, it 
should be remembered that the world has never 
known anything but change. We have been 
born into our present order, and we forget how 
recent it is. We think of it as somehow per- 
manent and with the sacredness of the estab- 
lished about it. As a matter of fact it is only 
of yesterday, and is merely one of the ceaseless 
experiments of man in society. Even if our 
present condition were satisfactory to more of 
us than it is, we could safely argue from his- 
tory that it could not last indefinitely. When 
added to that, we have a condition seething 
with righteous discontent, full of stupid ab- 
surdities as well as of cruel wrongs, we know 
that the time for change is ripe. Indeed the 
change is already going on. Everywhere 
democracy is beginning to sweep the world, 
and the dispossessed classes are entering into 



The Laws of the Open Door 41 

political power. "Willingly or unwillingly we 
are moving to an open door that will bring us 
to a change of scene. In high faith and in the 
courage of faith we look hopefully and long- 
ingly to the better day, trusting in the destiny 
of man and in the purpose of God. 

The second law of the Open Door may be 
called the law of fitness. The faith with which 
we face the future must be disciplined and 
rational, must know whereof it speaks. The 
temper of faith and hope is better in any case 
than that of indifference or despair, but if it be 
a sloppy trust that things are going to turn out 
all right, it will only lead to the morass ? 
Faith needs to be informed by fact, and in- 
spired by knowledge. It needs to be corrected 
and tested by experience, even when it looks 
for new experience. A vague Micawber-like 
confidence that somehow fortune will look 
after things is doomed to failure. That is to 
treat the world as a gamble, and if we do we 
will discover that we play against loaded dice. 
The universe is not so constructed that if a man 
opens his mouth to the sky, larks already 



42 The Open Door 

roasted will obligingly fall into it. That would 
make it a foolish world for man, and an impos- 
sible one for larks. We can never make any- 
thing of the open door, until we dismiss reso- 
lutely our childish dreams of chance happen- 
ings. 

There are many so-called chance discoveries, 
but on investigation we usually find that they 
were made by those who had put themselves in 
the way. Thousands of others had met the 
same chance, but never saw it, or if they did 
were by previous bent unable to do anything 
with it. The Inch goes to the good player, as 
every golfer knows. When a man is fit, every- 
thing comes his way. An opportunity goes 
a-begging for years, till the man who can use 
it comes along. The discovery was always 
possible, when the conditions of it were met. 
We tell tales of Galileo being led to his experi- 
ments about falling bodies by the fact that the 
famous Leaning Tower of Pisa was handy for 
such experiments, but the Leaning Tower could 
have suggested it to any one else. In the life 
of Galileo it is related how one day in the 
Cathedral he noticed a bronze lamp suspended 



The Laws of the Open Door 43 

by a long cord swinging slowly before the 
altar. During the singing he noticed that 
though naturally the lamp slackened its vibra- 
tion, it always beat in the same time, and from 
that he was led to begin his researches on the 
motion of the pendulum. But everybody in 
Pisa and elsewhere had seen a lamp swing. Or 
the story is told of Newton in his garden at 
Woolsthorpe seeing an apple fall to the ground 
and having suggested to him his researches on 
the force of gravity. But millions of apples 
had fallen, and some had even bumped the 
heads of men, with little enough suggestion. 
The time was fit, when the man was fit. 

This does not mean that it is always personal 
fitness that leads to the open door. What we 
may call social fitness is an even more impor- 
tant factor. Without this a single discovery, 
even if made, would signify little and could 
not be conserved. It is possible for a man to 
be before his age, born out of due time, though 
there are countless more cases of men who are 
behind their age. What usually happens is 
that the world had arrived at the stage where 
a reach forward was possible and even inevi- 



44 The Open Door 

table. All men who have achieved anything 
are the first to recognize that they built on the 
labours of others. Previous work had so ad- 
vanced the subject that contemporary thought 
and experiment found the further step easy. 
This is the explanation of the fact that often a 
discovery is made independently by different 
people almost simultaneously, like Darwin and 
Wallace with the evolution hypothesis. A cer- 
tain thing is in the air as we say, and men 
everywhere are working on it, feeling towards 
it, and when one takes the right step, behold 
there is an open door. Flying machines have 
been " in the air " for a much longer time than 
any machine has been. The story of any 
achievement is one of much obscure romance, 
and there are names on the roll of honour of 
which the public is ignorant. Sometimes the 
man, to whom comes the fame or the fortune, 
has done the minor part of the work. 

Especially true is this of the great move- 
ments which have profoundly affected man- 
kind. Lord Acton was preparing nearly all 
his life to write the History of Liberty and 
died without having done it. One hardly 



The Laws of the Open Door 45 

wonders that he should have been appalled at 
the task; for it would have meant writing 
practically the history of man. What open 
doors generation after generation have been 
passed through in the enfranchisement of man's 
mind and life. Sometimes we speak as if 
liberty were an American, or an English, or 
an Anglo-Saxon achievement. When some 
crisis in that history comes, and a new triumph 
is recorded, it is seen to be the work of no one 
man. In every world movement there is the 
same almost impersonal note. ISTo single man 
was responsible for the Renaissance, and no 
single man produced the Reformation. The 
modern democratic movement is impressive, 
because it calls no man father, and needs no 
sponsor. It too comes because the time is ripe, 
and the time has been ripened through new 
compunctions of conscience, and new stirrings 
of desire, and new movements of life. 

But no door opens through a magic word, or 
because people idly wish it. This law of fit- 
ness has to be emphasized to-day, because so 
many have a bland creed that everything is 



46 The Open Door 

going to be all right anyway. We hear men 
loudly proclaiming that they believe in prog- 
ress, and that the world has ever been growing 
better and must ever grow better. One may 
have cause to believe such a statement in the 
general without subscribing to every applica- 
tion of it. All change has not been progress, 
and there can be degeneracy as well as ad- 
vance. A general proposition may be true and 
have many exceptions in detail. A flowing 
tide can have many recessions and times 
when it looks like ebb instead of flow. It 
has been said by way of confidence in the ulti- 
mate future of America that the man who 
"goes bear on America goes broke." It is 
a graphic way of describing a general trust in 
the country's destiny, but sometimes the phrase 
has been used merely to boom a rise in the 
Stock Exchange. One can believe in the busi- 
ness future of a country, and yet know that 
the most favoured land can have times of de- 
pression. 

The soft creed of inevitable progress is an 
offense to all who desire to know and accept 
facts. The worst of it is that such a temper 



The Laws of the Open Door 47 

delays true progress, if it does not destroy the 
very chance of progress. If we take to think- 
ing of liberty as something that is bound to 
come as if it were ground out automatically, 
we endanger liberty itself, forgetting that its 
price is eternal vigilance. That is the price of 
anything worth having — the price of knowl- 
edge, of material and intellectual and moral 
advance. It is the law of the Open Door. In- 
stead of inevitable progress in human affairs, 
our actual experience is the opposite. There 
is a constant tendency to settle and sink. If 
we leave a garden alone, we soon learn what 
happens to the choicest flowers. If we leave 
any institution or condition of social life alone, 
we soon find it in the quagmire. The degra- 
dation of the best is always the worst kind of 
corruption. If we leave ourselves alone, we 
slide back to lower levels of thought and of 
practice. It may be a commonplace to say 
that there is no standing still for life, but it is 
none the less true. The life that does not 
move forward goes backward. It is not 
enough to have a pious faith in progress. To 
the faith must be added patience and knowl- 



48 The Open Door 

edge, the qualities that save the faith from 
shame. 

Man has indeed learned to fly — or is learning 
— but he never learned, and never would have 
learned by throwing himself off a pinnacle, even 
of the temple. The only way man could ever 
learn to fly was to understand the problem, and 
master the laws, and manipulate the forces at 
his disposal. Many things come to him in his 
long search to fathom the laws that govern the 
phenomena of nature and to understand the 
reason of things. The world is truly as big as 
man is big enough to inhabit and he has not 
yet taken possession of one tithe of his inherit- 
ance, but more important than believing in the 
bigness of his task is it to become big enough 
to undertake it. It is more important, simply 
because the one is the condition of the other. 
We take an immense step in every region of 
endeavour when we accept simply and humbly 
the fact that we have to do with a causal and 
never with a casual universe. 

Thus, we dare not let go our hold on ex- 
perience. Experience really means the results 
of experiment, the acquired and tested facts. 



The Laws of the Open Door 49 

Fortunately we are not confined to our own 
single experience, but have the vast body of 
human experience on which to fall back for 
guidance and correction. Not as on something 
sacred and immovable, a fetish to clog our souls 
and our feet, but simply as we do in every 
branch of natural science. In science there has 
grown up a body of experiments, which we are 
glad to accept, but which if need be we hold 
the right to test again and to extend, and from 
which we may draw different conclusions should 
new facts warrant it. So in the practice of life 
there has grown up a body of experiments, 
which has valid authority for us. There are 
some assured gains, facts that may be accepted, 
and principles that are certain. It is sometimes 
a little amusing, and oftener more pathetic, to 
hear men loudly proclaiming as a panacea 
something that the world has already tried out. 
Instead of marriage as we have it, they suggest 
a relationship which seems a rare and novel 
improvement, and appear amazed at their daring 
and original thinking. All who know anything 
of history know that it is only a reversion to 
type. The world has gone through that very 



50 The Open Door 

stage, and nature in her ruthless way of eliminat- 
ing the unfit has declared that there is no 
passage that way. 

In the individual life also the law of fitness 
applies. Previous attainment conditions further 
progress. The future is what the past makes 
possible. Hope is indeed a good companion, 
but rather a poor guide. Idle hope, with no 
backing of experience and no reserve of knowl- 
edge, will only once more illustrate the parable 
of the blind leading the blind. Mere wishing 
will never find any open doors, or if it does will 
not know what to make of them. If it were 
only a choice between hope and fear, there 
would be no hesitation as to which were better ; 
since it is better even to be duped by hope than 
to be betrayed by fear. But we are not con- 
fined to these alternatives. Hope may be 
informed and inspired by experience, leading 
ever to new triumphs. 

In Bunyan's classic allegory, perhaps the 
most attractive character is Hopeful, who made 
the way bright for his companion as well as for 
himself. There is also Mr. Fearing, one of the 



The Laws of the Open Door 51 

most troublesome pilgrims that Great-heart the 
guide ever had to do with. Great-heart's de- 
scription of the poor chicken-hearted man is a 
masterpiece. He had lain roaring at the Slough 
of Despond for about a month, until one sun- 
shiny morning he ventured and so got over, but 
when he was over he would scarce believe it. 
He had a Slough of Despond in his mind. At 
the entrance gate to the way and then at the 
Interpreter's door he behaved himself in the 
same fashion, shaking and shrinking, though 
he had the root of the matter in him ; for with 
all his trembling he would never turn tail and 
go back. " "When he was come to the entrance 
of the Valley of the Shadow of Death I thought 
I should have lost my man," says his guide. 
But Mr. Fearing did w r in through after a rather 
dismal journey, making mournful music for 
himself and others, only able to play on one 
string. In Bunyan's incomparable gallery of 
portraits there is another called Ignorance, a 
very brisk lad from the Country of Conceit. 
He seemed to find everything easy, and walked 
along comfortably with his mind full of good 
motions. When the other pilgrims asked for 



52 The Open Door 

the grounds of his easy assurance and tried to 
inform hiin, he replied, " That is your faith but 
not mine, yet mine I doubt not is as good as 
yours, though I have not in my head so many 
whimsies as you." With all his sprightly 
assurance, poor Ignorance, who would not learn 
of any one, came to a bad end. When he came 
to the Door, it was closed to him. 

The law of fitness means that to him that 
hath shall be given — a paradox which is true 
along the whole line of life. There is a corre- 
spondence between past achievement and future 
opportunity, between what a man has done and 
what he will get to do. There is even corre- 
spondence between what he has attempted and 
what he will be given to try, between the 
spirit of his past endeavour and the new occa- 
sions that will come his way. The man who 
has been faithful over a few things becomes 
the ruler over larger things. Whatever be the 
endowment of the talents, whether ten or five 
or one, if careful use of them is made, as a re- 
sult larger opportunities are afforded, and the 
promise of a fuller life is held out. There 



The Laws of the Open Door 53 

comes a new accession of power, a new occa- 
sion for practice, a new enlightenment into op- 
portunity, a new entrance into the spacious 
places of life. 

This is the natural principle of promotion 
that we use in all our social affairs. If a man 
makes good in any line of business, he is not 
rewarded by being laid on the shelf, but by 
getting some bigger task to perform. Educa- 
tion is graded to lead on from achievement to 
achievement. The principle runs not only 
through the business and the intellectual life, 
but also through the moral life. Spiritual pro- 
motion goes far more surely on this natural 
principle than even promotion in business does ; 
for only to him that hath can it be given. 
This principle is in the nature of things ; it is 
the way the world is built. We may trust the 
moral world, the whole life of man, on that 
basis. It is the law of the Open Door. The 
soul that has sincerely tried to be faithful can 
look for other chances to be faithful. If we 
have walked according to our light, we will get 
fuller light. If we have entered into past op- 
portunities, we may expect new ones. The 



54 The Open Door 

moral world will not go back on us. The fu- 
ture will contain nothing that is inconsistent 
with the past. None can prevent us from en- 
tering into our inheritance, and we may go in 
boldly to take possession. The door is open. 



Ill 

The Shut Door 



Ah, the past, the pearl-gift thrown * 
To hogs ; time's opportunity we made 
So light of, only recognized when flown. 

— Robert Browning. 



g» <* TO 



III 

THE SHUT DOOR 

HERE is a slushy optimism, 
which lays hold of the hope- 
ful point of view we are 
also recommending, but which 
pays no heed to any facts that 
seem to contradict it. From the last chapter, 
which states the laws of true hope, it will be 
seen that at least we do not seek to live in that 
Fools' Paradise. It is a poor ostrich trick to 
hide the head in the sand, thinking that if we 
refuse to see the impending evil it will cease to 
be. Yet it is a common trick. In the scho- 
lastic cant of our time many seem to think that 
the word " psychological " explains everything. 
As if things must be in reality as they are in 
our minds, and as if the universe accommodated 
itself to our view of it ! It is of course only 
the exaggeration of a fact. We do have power 
over our lives, and we live in a world which is 
largely our own creation. A bright and cheer- 

57 



58 The Open Door 

f ul spirit will find much to feed cheer on. A 
gloomy and fearful nature, which expects 
trouble, will get a good deal of what it ex- 
pects. But important as all this is for the 
happy conduct of life, it does not alter the fact 
that we are in a certain universal order, which 
does not budge for all our wishing. It will 
budge all right, when we know how to make 
it. Gravitation will not cease to work, merely 
because we would like to fly. The only way 
to fly is to use gravitation, by playing off 
against it some other forces we have learned. 

Cheap optimism thinks that if things are not 
going our way, all we need to do is to form a 
Sunshine Club, and keep smiling and " boost- 
ing." If we keep on saying it is all right and 
is going to be all right, then it will be as we 
say. It is a pretty good thing to have a smile 
on the lips and cheer in the heart, provided 
that we do not look on these as a quack medi- 
cine to cure all. It was a great English theo- 
logian, and not as we might have expected a 
scientist, who suggested the reign of law in the 
simple phrase, " things are what they are, and 
their consequences will be what they will be." 



The Shut Door 59 

There still remains of course the task of finding 
out what they really are, but we are not much 
helped in that by merely putting on rose-col- 
oured spectacles to view them. There is one 
way of reaching a pleasant conclusion by elim- 
inating everything that tells against us, but it is 
not a way of courage. It is of a piece with 
the common practice of finding comfort by ig- 
noring everything around us of squalor and 
ugliness, and by resolutely excluding every- 
thing that will not come sedately into our 
colour scheme. 

Our insistence of the Open Door as the fit 
figure for human life might be thought to be 
ministering to such shallow optimism. When 
we point to the forward look, and to man as 
the master and not merely the victim of his 
fate, when we glorify opportunity, it may be 
asked if there are no shut doors, no inexorable 
barriers, no opportunities that are closed. In- 
deed there are, and it is from the stern and 
tragic background of the deprivation of life 
that we would fain set the hope that saves. 
Whatever may still be available, there are some 
things irrevocable. Not even tears can wash 



60 The Open Door 

away the writing of the Moving Finger, when 
once it sets down the recorded fact. 

At some times of our life we are entranced 
by the opening of doors, by the romance of the 
unknown that seems ever approaching us. On 
every side there are avenues reaching out, un- 
folding fresh vistas of thought and feeling and 
experience. It is a rich and large world we 
inhabit, and there seems no end to what we 
can be and do. In the buoyancy of hope we 
never dream that disappointment can lie for us 
at the end of any path we may choose, that 
there can be for us ultimate failure in any line. 
If anything we are embarrassed by the richness 
of our opportunities, and we hardly know what 
to be at, or what road to take. Doors open at 
a touch. Body and mind and heart and soul 
are feeling for their possibilities, giving us 
hints of pleasant adventures and satisfying 
experiences. 

The unfolding of the powers of youth suggest 
many worlds to conquer, and it does not matter 
much with which we begin. There is plenty 
of time and we will have plenty of opportuni- 



The Shut Door 61 

ties. If this does not do, we can try something 
else. If this road we are traversing does not 
suit, there will be many a crossroad into which 
we can turn ; or even we can go back and begin 
over again. In youth life is long and very 
spacious. Doors and ways keep opening in 
most pleasant fashion, as they do to the knight- 
errant in chivalry or to the hero in fairy-land. 
We cannot think that any road will lead us to 
a standstill, or if it does that it will not be a 
simple thing to retrace our steps and try our 
luck again. We cannot imagine ourselves 
without resources, helpless in the face of cir- 
cumstances. The pathos of hope ! To the 
contemplative mind there is nothing so beauti- 
ful, and perhaps nothing so sad, as this buoyant 
mood. " If youth only knew : if age only 
could," is an old French saying. 

It is perhaps just as well that youth does not 
know ; for if youth did know, youth might 
never try, and everybody would be the loser, 
both youth and age and the world at large. 
It would be fatal if youth knew, in the sense 
of believing that nothing was worth a venture 
and that eventual disappointment awaits every 



62 The Open Door 

effort. That is false doctrine, stifling high hope 
at its birth, and sapping the strength of noble 
life. It is youth that keeps the world alive, 
not merely in the prosaic material sense, but in 
the spiritual sense also that we depend upon 
the supply of vigour and courage and faith and 
hope from men, who do not calculate results, 
and who go gaily into the fight. It is pitiful 
folly, or worse, to be ever crooning vanity of 
vanities as the one burden of the song of life. 
" If youth only knew," what then would be our 
counsel ? To depress hope and take the heart 
out of courage, to preach the blase creed that 
everything ends in vexation of spirit, and that 
there is nothing better than that a man should 
cultivate a cautious moderate Epicureanism ? 
If that is the fruit of worldly wisdom and the 
experience of age, then indeed it would be folly 
to be wise. 

Still there are some things which it would be 
well for youth to know, in order that its ener- 
gies might be directed into the right channels ; 
and one of them is the lesson that opportunities 
are not endless, and that occasions can be lost, 
and a door, which seems always open to be 



The Shut Door 63 

entered when it suits, may at last be shut. 
" Experience is a good school," says Jean Paul 
Kichter, " but the fees are high." Yes, the fees 
are high, and they may be too high. They 
have a way of getting higher. The price be- 
comes prohibitive. The fees may be so high 
that though we have got the experience all 
right, we may not be able to buy one single 
opportunity of using the experience. A door 
may be shut which will not open to bribes, or 
threats, or pleadings, or tears. If youth only 
knew this, it would be worth knowing, not that 
it may be made to despair, but that it may be 
made serious, accepting its great opportunities 
and its solemn responsibilities. It is wise to 
learn truth and to accept actual facts ; and this 
is the absolute truth, a fact of daily experience, 
that there are things which are irrevocable, 
beyond recall, beyond another chance, and 
when we come up for another chance we find 
that the door is shut. 

The first natural illustration of this is the 
very passage of time itself. Sentimentally 
once a year we are reminded of this, as the 



64 The Open Door 

shadows of the dying year deepen around us. 
There is of course nothing in the passage of the 
last day of the old year into the first day of 
the new year — nothing beyond what happens 
in the passage of every day. It is however a 
convenient measure of time, and a customary 
occasion to review the past and to consider how 
it has left us. We may have more time 
granted us, but that time on which we look 
back is irrevocable : we may have a future, but 
the past is gone beyond recall. We would per- 
haps like to go back and alter some of the 
things. Here we made a decision, or took a 
step that carried large consequences ; here we 
turned definitely in a certain way. We would 
like to do otherwise now ; we are calm as we 
look, while then we were swayed by passion or 
interest. We might have gone another way : 
certainly it was open to us, but we can no 
more go that way. Whatever we may now be 
able to do, we cannot undo the past. The door 
is shut. 

This is true of more than time. It is true of 
every sphere of life and every power of our 
nature. There is a period when the faculties 



"The Shut Door 65 

are in a fluid state as it were, able to run into 
almost any mould, but after we have been set 
in a particular kind of work and are bent to a 
particular way of life, many doors are shut 
that formerly were open. The man who has 
begun to study at thirty may become truly 
learned and may develop magnificently in 
mental power, but he knows that there are 
certain branches of the scholar's work that are 
closed to him. The time has passed when he 
could enter and take his place with the fore- 
most. There are some losses that cannot be 
repaired, and some chances that can never be 
regained. The loom of life weaves out the 
web, and after a time there is no going back 
to gather up dropped stitches. The web must 
remain with its flaws. It does not mean that 
we need to have signs of age and of failing 
powers to convince us that for us some doors 
are now shut. Indeed the stronger we are in 
our special career, the more we realize that we 
have excluded ourselves from other things that 
once were possible in other lines. 

The young man facing life has before him 



66 The Open Door 

many alternatives even in the matter of the 
kind of work he will do, but it does not take 
long before he realizes that the alternatives 
have begun to dwindle, till after some years of 
work he must go on with his choice, if he is to 
make anything of his life at all. The Un- 
just Steward, when the prospect of losing 
his situation was before him, was only 
stating a fact of experience when he said, 
" Dig I cannot ; to beg I am ashamed." The 
more special a man's work is, the more doors 
have been shut against him if he would seek 
other work. 

We find it hard to believe that we can lose 
capacity, even when we admit the possibility 
of losing opportunity. In youth life looks as 
if it were to be merely the endless opening of 
doors. The senses awaken and lead out to 
constantly new experiences, and all the facul- 
ties unfold, and opportunities come tumbling 
over each other as they offer themselves and 
press themselves. There is an embarrassment 
of riches as the whole world lies before the 
nascent life. He feels that he can go anywhere, 
and be anything, and do anything. "The 



The Shut Door 67 

world's mine oyster, which I with sword will 
open." 

In the matter of capacity the average boy 
with a good education can be any one of half 
a hundred things almost equally well. Now 
and again there is a boy with a single definite 
bent, born with a temperament which drives 
him irresistibly, but that is rare. The ordinary 
college boy stands before a great many possible 
openings, and his friends think it fortunate 
when at last he gets his alternative down to 
two. He will gravely say that he is not sure 
at present whether he will take up architecture 
or agriculture. Or he is hesitating between 
being a doctor or a minister ; or he is not sure 
whether to go in for law or business. There is 
no affectation about it, as older people some- 
times think. It is an exact statement of the 
case. In youth the whole world seems to lie 
open to a man, and he can choose his path. It 
is the charm and romance of life in youth that 
this is so. He does not know that it will not 
be thus forever, and even not for long. He 
does not realize, what his elders have experi- 
enced, that when one passes through a certain 



68 The Open Door 

door, the others begin to shut. We do not go 
very far before we almost hear them shutting. 
Door after door swings on its hinges and clangs 
to the portal. 

Capacity, which formerly was fluid, gets set 
and hardens. It is at last in its groove. In 
acquiring facility for its special work, it loses 
adaptability for other kinds of works. Take 
the shoemaker from his last, and you may spoil 
a good shoemaker without getting anything of 
value in return. In Browning's beautiful poem 
to his wife, One Word More, the story is re- 
called that Eaphael the great painter, Eaphael 
of the dear Madonnas, wrote a volume of son- 
nets. Artists, who acquire mastery of one 
medium, are often ambitious of rivalling their 
fame in another line. It might well be that 
Raphael should think little of his Madonnas 
and would fain write great poems. But " you 
and I will never read that volume." And 
Dante, of the dread Inferno, once prepared to 
paint an angel, according to report. The poet 
suggests that he stopped his painting because 
certain people of importance entered when the 
inspiration was on him, and interrupted. " You 



The Shut Door 69 

and I will never see that picture." Even for 
them, the most gifted sons of men, there are 
doors that are shut. 

There are even sterner limitations still. 
There are things that bring before us in even 
more drastic manner our lost occasions and the 
irreparable past. Think of the doors that death 
shuts, for example. "It is the bitterest ele- 
ment," says Lord Morley, " in the vast irony of 
human life that the time-worn eyes to which a 
son's success would have brought the purest 
gladness are so often closed forever before suc- 
cess has come." We may however have bit- 
terer thoughts in the presence of death than 
even that. We may know something of the 
remorse of lost opportunities, which can never 
come to us though we seek with tears. Death 
closes doors not only for the dead, but for some 
of the living. In Carlyle's Eeminiscences of 
his wife Jane Welsh Carlyle there are some sad 
passages, where he recalls scenes of the past. 
One cannot read them without almost hearing 
the sob in the words from the old man's breast, 
as he brings back in memory the occasions 



70 The Open Door 

when his wife had been his unwearied helper, 
and as he longs for the chance to tell her what 
he felt. Many a man has known that moment, 
it mav be when the first sod fell clattering 
upon the lowered coffin. Or he recalls tired 
eyes that are closed, and thinks of patient lips 
that no longer can speak their comforting word, 
and remembers loving hands that lie still. At 
such time we know too poignantly that there 
are some things that are irreparable. It may 
be that we would fain show some of the love 
we felt but never expressed, lavish tenderness 
on the dear head, or sob repentance to the 
gentle soul. Too late ! The door is shut which 
no man openeth. 

What is true here is true of all that we call 
opportunities. For all of us there are some 
mistakes we would gladly retrieve, and some 
chances we would wish to regain, and some 
steps to retrace. It is hard to realize that 
every step in our journey is really irrevocable. 
Men are inclined to think about some grave de- 
cision that they can at the worst go back if the 
venture turn not out as they hope, but it is a 
vain thought. They may return, but never to 



The Shut Door 71 

the same place, and they who return are never 
the same. The scene has changed, and they 
have changed. When Goethe wrote the second 
part of Faust, he remarked that the man who 
had written Part I was dead. 

A deeper shade comes over our thought of 
the irreparable past, when we see that it is not 
merely a question of having lost certain oppor- 
tunities that will never come back to us, but 
that we have lost something of the self we 
might have been. It is not only that time has 
been squandered and opportunities missed, but 
also a character has been formed thus far for 
good or ill, and a life burdened with disabilities 
which past action has brought. Men do not 
often speak of this, but with some it represents 
the one acute sting of all retrospect. They 
sometimes think pathetically of what they 
might have been, and what they might have 
achieved. This note is often heard from men, 
when they open their hearts in moments of 
self -revelation. Even when new life opens up 
and new hope is found, there remains the 
knowledge that the old life is not given back 



72 The Open Door 

to be lived over, and the old opportunities are 
never renewed. 

Kepentance can bring forgiveness of sin. The 
past can be buried, its sorrow forgotten and its 
shame covered up, but even sin forgiven can 
never undo all the past. Many a man knows 
to his cost that he is weak when he might have 
been strong, that qualities in him are languid 
which should have been vigorous, that his 
character is poor in places where it might have 
been rich. There are indeed many illustrations 
which compel us to look with chastened heart 
at the tragic deprivations of life. It is against 
all history and against all experience to act as 
if any door of opportunity would never shut 
either for individuals or for nations. We only 
need to know a little of the past to have seen 
the doors at the appointed time crash at the 
threshold. 

The one subject of habit suggests the many 
places where we ourselves have opened and 
shut doors for ourselves. In common speech 
we say that a certain thing has now become a 
second nature to us, and the phrase accurately 
describes the fact. By repeated action habit 



The Shut Door 73 

builds itself into the very fibre, until it is 
securely entrenched in the life. It begins to 
work tentatively and gently, but in the end its 
sway is despotic. Usually we only hear of the 
evil side of this subject, and moralists naturally 
warn us that failure in life issues very largely 
from the contracting of bad habits. But like 
all other laws of life, it is for life, not to destroy 
but to conserve. It is because of habit that 
man is able to do so many things. He can 
hand over the great mass of ordinary affairs to 
be attended to by habit. This only shows how 
inexorable it is all the same. What was a 
tendency becomes ingrained, and after a time 
we are in most things walking bundles of habits. 
There is little wonder that moralists emphasize 
the importance of the habit-forming period of 
youth. Many of the doors, that later we find 
shut upon us, have been shut by our own hands. 

There is no gospel in the teaching of in- 
exorable nature and implacable consequence. 
To speak alone of closed doors that no man can 
open would be to preach fatalism. But that is 
the stern background from which there emerges 



74 The Open D 



oor 



a possible gospel. Hope itself is born of need ; 
for what a man hath, why doth he yet hope 
for ? If there is no gospel in the doctrine of 
the shut door, it alone makes a gospel necessary. 
Gospel means the good news that all is not lost, 
that recovery is possible, that a way opens out 
from the bondage into a new liberty. If we 
must not treat the world as a place of childish 
magic where consequences are playthings, if we 
must be sure that in every act we are launch- 
ing a cause which has its inevitable effect, there 
still remains the fact that new causes can be 
launched. Though the old is never obliterated, 
the new is always possible. There can be the 
new life itself, with its new meaning, and new 
motive, and new manner of living. 

In this whole subject of the irretrievable we 
must be careful not to state it in terms of an 
unmoral fatalism, breeding a cureless despair 
both of the past and of the future. While there 
is life there is always hope. We sometimes 
speak of nature as if it were a machine, wound 
up to grind out its products till it runs down. 
We may not be able to say what nature is, but 
at least we know enough to be sure of what it 



The Shut Door 75 

is not ; and whatever nature may be, it is not a 
machine. When we discourse on the inexo- 
rableness of natural law, we seem often to be 
thinking of a machine, and certainly we are 
leaving out of account certain facts and aspects. 
The world is not all red with tooth and claw. 
There are beneficent and healing forces in 
nature. She covers up her scars, and even 
makes them beautiful. We can put nature on 
our side with her healthful streams. The 
true figure of life is not that of being held and 
ground in a ruthless dreadful machine. Eather 
it is a House of Many Mansions, where man 
can be at home, and yet never can come to the 
end of his surprises. Doors everywhere can 
open to him, doors into knowledge, and into 
beauty, and into peace, and into joy, and into 
fullness of life. 

Our consideration of the shut doors of life, 
while it should not lead to despair, should 
surely make us serious. Better know some- 
thing of sorrow and remorse, than live the shal- 
low surface life that never thinks at all. It 
might be well for youth to call a halt amid the 



76 "The Open Door 

enticements of novel experience, and lay hold 
of the fact that there may be one of life's bless- 
ings which, if lost, a man can never find again 
though he seek it diligently with tears. Men 
no longer young are sometimes tempted to 
linger too long over the backward look, and to 
stand by the grave of buried hopes. They 
think of what they might have been and done, 
how they might have grown in character and 
in gracious life. They think of what they have 
lost by the way. It is a mood which, rightly 
used, has its value, though it is not without 
danger. Its value lies in clearly appreciating 
facts and accepting them calmly. It may also 
drive a man to redeem the time and buy up his 
opportunities. Its danger is to spend itself in 
sentiment and self-pity, or to blind the eyes 
to the new doors of opportunity that are still 
open, in the painful thought of those that are 
now shut. 

If we look back, it is that we may learn to 
look forward. The lesson of any regret or re- 
morse in the backward look is, not that we may 
feel the despair of the past, but that we may 
feel the responsibility of the present. An ex- 



The Shut Door 77 

elusive view of the past would drain from us 
all strength : that way madness lies. If we 
look backward to learn, we can and ought to 
look forward to hope. We can learn, only be- 
cause we hope. We sweep out the dead au- 
tumn leaves, because the fresh buddings of 
spring will come and cover the earth with its 
sweet green mantle. The past may have its 
dead to bury, but while there is life there is 
hope. It is in no spirit of childish optimism 
we can still look for the open door of life's pos- 
sibilities, but made solemn by the knowledge 
that no opportunity in all the world is offered 
to us forever. All the future is ours, and to 
look forward in any useful sense means to ask 
what it is going to be. The same wasted time, 
and lost chances, and broken endeavours of 
good ? A life circling round an ever poorer 
self with narrowing opportunities, or a life that 
reaches out through service to ever larger ends 
till it passes gladly, laden with rich spoils ? 
Our sombre look at the irreparable past and at 
the shut doors will have done its true work, if 
it make us serious, and move us to the new en- 
deavour of the new way. 



IV 

The Doorways of Tradition 



The old order changeth, yielding place to new, 
And God fulfills Himself in many ways, 
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world. 

— Tennyson. 



IV 



THE DOORWAYS OF TRADITION 




N some ways we treat the past 
with too much reverence. 
We sometimes give it a false 
authority. This is true even 
although, as we saw in the 
last two chapters, we also often underrate its 
importance and its enduring results. We can- 
not wisely face our future without knowing the 
past and taking it into account. The law of 
fitness conditions our opportunities, and the 
law of consequences is unfailing. These two 
laws justify much of the authority, which the 
past claims and receives from us. At the same 
time we let ourselves be hag-ridden by tradi- 
tion, and the open door is hidden from us. The 
very achievements of the past have the effect 
of robbing the next generation of its own legiti- 
mate triumphs. We forget that the sacredest 
traditions which we rightly prize were once 
themselves only open doors, through which 



82 The Open Door 

men passed and took possession. By the same 
right we too may press towards the gateway 
of our own generation. 

The relative place of the traditional and the 
original makes an interesting study in every 
region of life. We see the battle for pre- 
cedence going on in politics, in law, in educa- 
tion, in industry, and perhaps most acutely of 
all in religion. A political system gathers a 
kind of sacredness from the fact that genera- 
tions were born into it and brought up under 
it. It may have outlived its usefulness, and 
may be a most cumbrous machine that only 
works with creaks and jolts, but we will patch 
it up and tinker it endlessly, rather than send 
it to the scrap-heap. It is only in times of 
revolution that such summary treatment is 
meted out to it. Even after the spasm we find 
men laboriously picking out pieces from the 
pile to work into the new machine. 

A legal code gathers authority from the mere 
fact that it is called law. It may be absurd, it 
may be unjust, with enactments that none 
would attempt to justify by reason, yet in too 
will be kept going, till it falls through of its 



The Doorways of Tradition 83 

own weight. The proverbial law's delays are 
often due to the conscientious working of a 
crazy machine. Charles Dickens in " Bleak 
House" scarified the absurdities and corrup- 
tions of the old English Court of Chancery, yet 
that court began as an attempt to correct strict 
law by equity. Dickens' satire of the state of 
law of his time, while exaggerated, was essen- 
tially true. His hero in " David Copperfield " 
when looking out for a profession was advised 
to be a proctor. On asking what that was, his 
friend replied, i; He is a functionary whose ex- 
istence in the natural course of things would 
have terminated about two hundred years ago. 
I can tell you best what he is by telling you 
what Doctors' Commons is. It's a little out-of- 
the-way place, where they administer what is 
called ecclesiastical law, and play all kinds of 
tricks with obsolete old monsters of Acts of 
Parliament, which three-fourths of the world 
know nothing about, and the other fourth sup- 
poses to have been dug up, in a fossil state, in 
the days of the Edwards. It is a place that has 
an ancient monopoly in suits about people's wills 
and people's marriages, and disputes among 



84 The Open Door 

ships and boats. . . . It is a very pleasant, 
profitable little affair of private theatricals." 

Space would fail if we attempted to recount 
the absurdities that for generations held their 
place in education. We can recognize and 
appraise some of the more ancient absurdities, 
both in the subjects taught, and in the manner 
of teaching them. We see them to have been 
relics of past ages, when they had some ap- 
propriateness and meaning — grammar taught 
in a fog of weird forms and barbarous terms, 
Latin versification to boys who knew nothing 
of what even English poetry was. The sub- 
jects and the methods had gathered sacredness 
through mere antiquity, and were kept going 
through use and wont. It is still hard for 
some of us who were trained in the old school 
to rid our minds of the idea that there can be 
only one true system of education. We go on 
doing things for no other reason than that they 
have been done, and we assume that there can 
be no other right method of doing them. The 
incubus of tradition lies heavy on us, and we 
lay the hard burden upon the tender backs of 
the next generation. 



"The Doorways of Tradition 85 

Our present social order and industrial system 
have also "acquired merit" in the selfsame 
way. They have grown, and we have grown 
accustomed to them, so that even when we 
ourselves can riddle them with criticism we 
think them inevitable. We dislike the thought 
of change from our static conditions. "We feel 
that anything else would be unworkable, and 
are afraid to touch the whole social fabric in 
case it comes down about our ears. Economic 
principles like supply and demand, and the 
divine right of competition, are intoned in our 
ears like items of a sacred creed. Some even 
resent criticism, and speak as if sacrilegious 
hands were laid on the carved work of the 
sanctuary itself. Property is spoken of as if it 
had some inalienable rights, instead of being 
the product of society which society can alter 
if it desires. 

In every art there grows a system of pre- 
scribed rules, a sacred way of doing things. 
Established schools arise according to definite 
canons laid down once for all. The ideal be- 
comes clever variations of recognized standards 
— vain repetitions as the heathen do ! Even 



86 The Open Door 

science achieves some formulas which acquire a 
certain sacredness. The chief enemies of any 
advance often come from these, who work in 
the same sphere, and who Hke to think that 
they have reached absolute authority. Heretics 
are not confined to ecclesiastical circles. Doc- 
tors are sometimes the bitterest opponents of 
new methods in medicine. Men who have 
themselves become authorities in a science 
shake their heads gravely over the vagaries 
of newer schools. Science fortunately for 
itself does not suffer so much, since it cannot 
suffer so long, because of its frankly exper- 
imental basis. It may be disconcerting to 
have settled views of the constitution of matter 
upset by radioactivity, but radium and its 
properties can be seen and somehow must be 
taken into account. 

It is not to be wondered that in religion the 
same process should be seen intensified, for it 
deals with the most intimate region of life and 
with the profoundest experiences. The very 
reverence which the soul has for ancient truth, 
fragrant with sacred memories and holy asso- 
ciations, makes it easy to give it authority. No 



The Doorways of Tradition 87 

institutions among men last so long without 
shadow of change as those that have to do with 
religion. There are more functionaries than 
Dickens' proctor, whose existence in the natural 
course of things should have terminated two 
hundred years ago ; and there are some other 
institutions that go on as profitable little affairs 
of private theatricals. More readily here than 
anywhere else in life do we fall back on 
authority, of church, or creed, or book. Tradi- 
tion carries more weight here than elsewhere, 
and fights its battle more stubbornly. In what 
folio ws we naturally take many of our illustra- 
tions from this sphere because tradition is more 
deeply intrenched here. It is not that any 
different quality of human nature is displayed, 
but merely the same natural characteristic as 
is seen elsewhere. We sometimes speak of the 
ecclesiastical mind, as if it were a different order 
of human being. But it is only man showing 
there the same temper as we find in other 
spheres, only in an exaggerated form. 

Is there a justification for this wide-spread 
tendency ? Is there a true instinct lying back 



88 The Open Door 

of this tenderness with past institutions ? There 
must be, since wo find it so universal. Of 
course temperament and training do much to 
influence us as to the amount of authority we 
give to tradition. Great masses of men and 
whole churches practically rest on it, and those 
who think themselves free of it often find the 
same refuge under disguise. Custom and tradi- 
tion play their immense part with only a dif- 
ference of name. The restlessness of Protes- 
tantism, with its ferment of new opinions and 
theories, may seem to be well contrasted with 
the settled trust in tradition. As a matter of 
fact, however, though there is more freedom, 
we often find in Protestantism only a trans- 
ference of authority from the Church to the 
Bible. Historically the tyranny of tradition is 
seen becoming so great that there is a swing of 
the pendulum to the other extreme. To-day in 
some quarters there is seen impatience of au- 
thority, and an exaggeration of the rights of 
the individual, and an assertion of the exclusive 
claim of personal experience. 

There is a true tradition and a right weight 
to be given to the past. In every region of 



"The Doorways of Tradition 89 

knowledge and in every branch of activity wise 
men recognize that through the ages there 
accumulates experience, and that customs and 
thoughts and methods as well as material are 
transmitted. In religion as elsewhere it is 
folly to cut ourselves from the life of the past, 
and to refuse to enter into our inheritance. 
We cannot do this without loss in any sphere 
of life, in law and morals and science and art, 
and to do it in religion always spells failure. 
This great fact explains the mass and weight 
of the whole Roman Catholic position and its 
attraction to many minds, and the lack of it 
explains why so often Protestantism has broken 
up into sections and diffused itself vainly. 
The true attitude does not despise tradition. 
It only sifts it, and tests it, and seeks to sep- 
arate false elements from the true. To have a 
right attitude towards tradition in religion 
settles for us many questions. It makes an 
epoch in a man's life, when he goes to the root 
of the whole matter of religious evidence, and 
raises the question of what is original and what 
is merely traditional, what is personal and 
what is derivative, what he owes to custom or 



90 "The Open Door 

unthinking usage and what he arrives at inde- 
pendently or at least what he has made his 
own. 

When we speak of originality we do not 
mean starting afresh, but making vital tradition 
our own. Not that personal experience is 
independent of all authority, but that it is to 
the soul the supreme evidence, the corrobora- 
tion and attestation of the truth by which it 
lives. This is the difference of appeal a religious 
message makes. To some it is hearsay, some- 
thing that can be classed with rumour, oral or 
written words, and therefore something outside 
of life, and it does not make much difference 
whether they believe it or not. To others it is 
something spoken to heart and conscience, and 
it is as if it were written within, till it seems as 
though it were graved indelibly on the soul, 
something with which they are in vital connec- 
tion. They have thrilled to it, made it their 
own, and respond in newness of life. 

Of course in a sense we owe everything to 
others. What have we that we have not re- 
ceived? The chief education of life consists 



The Doorways of Tradition 91 

in learning what has been said, and felt, and 
thought, and done by others. We enter into 
the inheritance of the past with all its gathered 
riches. All knowledge is a growth, and if the 
fruit is now it is because the roots are back in 
the sub-soil of history. We are dressed in 
garments that come to us ready-to-wear, made 
by other hands. Art, science, literature, re- 
ligion, all the precious essence of the human 
spirit, is exuded drop by drop through the toil 
and tears of many generations. If we know 
anything, it is because others told it us. In 
every sphere of human life, practical, intellec- 
tual, moral, spiritual, other men laboured and 
we have entered into their labours. Education 
in any branch of learning must begin with sim- 
ple reception of information. The child is not 
asked to prove the multiplication table, but to 
learn it. Some of the trouble of our education 
is that he is not always made to learn it. Ex- 
ternal authority is the first method of educa- 
tion. The child is naturally imitative, and the 
process of learning is a form of mimicry. He 
says and believes things not of himself, but be- 
cause others tell them to him. 



92 The Open Door 

This is true of religion, as well as of other 
spheres of knowledge. Some religious beliefs 
may be primitive and instinctive, but if we 
were confined to that source we can imagine 
how fragmentary and mistaken they would be. 
We are in a great succession, and our inner life 
is shaped and coloured for us. We are born 
into a spiritual climate as well as a physical 
one, and the effects of the first are even more 
far-reaching than the latter. We cannot re- 
nounce authority altogether, even if we would 
like to do it. And authority ought to have 
great weight w^ith us always. It is foolish to 
run amuck against all custom and immemorial 
usage and tradition, as if the world could begin 
all over again with us. It is absurd to suppose 
that past history can go for nothing in religion, 
any more that it can in the life of a nation. 
External authority plays an important part in 
our early religious education, as it plays an im- 
portant part in all other education. We be- 
lieve first of all because we have heard. 

So far as it goes, that is satisfactory ground. 
Tradition is not the seat of authority in relig- 
ion, but it is foolish to exclude it without ade- 



The Doorways of Tradition 93 

quate examination. A wide and long-continued 
faith is at least presumptive evidence, that 
there is something in it to be examined with 
reverence and care. To deny any authority to 
tradition in religion would be logically to cut 
away the feet from any form of knowledge, 
and to condemn any kind of education what- 
ever. The Church must ever begin her argu- 
ment, as the Psalmist began his plea, by the 
statement, " We have heard with our ears, O 
God, our fathers have told us, what work Thou 
didst in their days, in the times of old." It is 
not enough for a stable and permanent faith, 
but it at least is something to begin with. 
Tradition can never take the place of experi- 
ence; but without tradition experience would 
lack much of its weight. 

Absolute originality is impossible in anything. 
What we usually mean by originality in the 
great creative works of genius in literature 
and art is simply individuality, that the artist 
has taken from the common stock, but given it 
a new setting, passed the truth through his 
own mind and heart, brought out new beauties 
and fresh aspects. We call Shakespeare the 



94 The Open Door 

most original of English authors. Yet Shake- 
speare got his blank verse from Marlowe, his 
plots from wherever he could find them, and 
even sometimes lifted a whole play bodily. 
But he made them " suffer a sea-change into 
something passing rich and strange," so that 
they are his absolutely. If any poet was origi- 
nal it was Kobert Burns, singing with native 
grace. Yet many of his best songs were the 
songs of the country, crooned by the old 
women over the fire, and whistled by the 
ploughboys in the field. But he passed them 
through the alembic of his own nature, so that 
they came out coloured by the blood of his own 
hot heart, and they are his alone. "Without 
this individuality work is drudgery, and art is 
sterile, and worship is convention. The highest 
originality is always related to the old and the 
past. Truth does not begin with us any more 
than it will die with us. In a very real sense 
we can say nothing that is entirely of ourself ; 
and if we do say anything of value, it is be- 
cause others have told it us. The student of 
history or science or art cannot ignore the past, 
though unimpeachable certainty may be his 



The Doorways of "Tradition 95 

chief purpose. A man of science, who tried to 
perform all the experiments that brought his 
subject up to its present stage, would need to 
look forward to a long life. There is nothing 
more offensive in religion than contempt of the 
past in doctrine, in faith, in life. 

Because of this, the prevalent temptation is 
undoubtedly a temptation to lay too much em- 
phasis on tradition and external authority, and 
to leave no scope for new vistas of truth to be 
opened up. The conventional has a firm hold 
on us, because religion is not a living energiz- 
ing power with us. One note of Christ's work 
is the stress He laid on the single life. He 
taught and enforced the originality of the sep- 
arate soul. We need only think of the value 
He put on the individual to show this. He 
singled each man out from the mass, and made 
him stand, a life apart. And the result of the 
Gospel is always to define the personality with 
clear lines, each with separate character, pe- 
culiar gifts, special opportunity, particular 
work and service. Each has a contribution to 
make distinct from everybody else. This un- 



96 The Open Door 

doubtedly follows from the teaching of Jesus, 
and we see this emerging in actual life in the 
early Church. The spirit of every man in direct 
contact with the spirit of God is the New Tes- 
tament conception, of religion. 

]STow all this is opposed to the spirit and 
practice of the world, the natural inertia of the 
ordinary state of things. Society works in- 
cessantly at eradicating spiritual originality. 
It keeps reducing men to the level of things — 
a dead level — cutting all to pattern, rubbing 
off corners. We know how society looks 
askance at the original and the eccentric, and 
has hard names of crank and fanatic for all 
who run counter to social custom and preju- 
dice. One must not speak strongly, or think 
freely, or act individually. There is of course 
good in this ; for it pulls up, as well as rubs 
down, and it is a useful deterrent to parade of 
singularity. The genius of society aims at col- 
lective action, and moulds all to one type of 
life. The sway of custom is strong in every- 
thing, and mere protest against custom may be 
only conceit or antisocial feeling. Still, it is 
this conventionality which makes for medioc- 



The Doorways of ^Tradition 97 

rity, and for the prosaic in every line of life. 
Genius is always more or less of an affront, 
either not recognized or hated or feared. 

In politics we have the fetish of public opin- 
ion, as if what the man in the street thinks 
must be good policy, and the opportunist states- 
man swings tremulously to catch the popular 
breeze. He has no burning convictions, no im- 
movable principles. In art also the world 
wants only clever adaptations and repetitions, 
the reproduction of past triumphs. In religion 
especially this temptation abounds. We have 
heard with our ears, our fathers have told us, 
and we accept unthinkingly the past record. 
How much of our faith is taken by us on trust, 
a matter of hearsay ? Men repeat catch 
phrases, which have gathered a certain sacred- 
ness from antiquity. How seldom we hear a 
real live original voice, that is not merely an 
echo of some one else ! In spite of what we 
have admitted as to the place of authority in 
education, the true education after all is tested 
by what we say and do and think of ourselves, 
and not because others have told us. Though 
it is not given to every one to be a pioneer of 



98 The Open Door 

truth, yet truth is little to us until we have ab- 
sorbed it and made it our own, so much our 
own that it has practically ceased to be deriva- 
tive and becomes personal. In religion tradi- 
tion must have become experience before any- 
thing is achieved. We must walk by faith and 
not by custom : we must live by insight and 
not by prescription. 

Originality of a certain kind is always wel- 
come. The Athenian temper is more or less 
common, a desire to hear and tell some new 
thing, and many more than the old king would 
be willing to offer a reward for the discovery 
of a new pleasure. Originality of execution in 
literature and art and work generally is always 
sure of recognition. But originality of thought 
has a stiff up-hill battle to fight. Originality, 
which asks for a new standpoint, which seeks 
to change current views, which attempts to 
alter custom and influence life, has usually to 
learn the meaning of neglect and opposition. 
In different forms and ways men have been 
saying through all the centuries that a prophet 
cannot come out of Nazareth, that no good can 



The Doorways of Tradition 99 

come from Galilee, that a majority is always 
in the right, that safety is got by the traditions 
of the fathers, and truth from the wisdom of 
the ancients, that the law shall not perish from 
the priest, nor council from the wise, nor the 
word from the prophet — and all along the cen- 
turies this complacent creed has been con- 
tinually falsified. It is from the unthought-of 
quarter that the light comes. It is the unex- 
pected that happens. From following the herd 
is a prophet chosen, or from the steps of the 
throne, or from the priesthood itself. 

In other planes than the religious something 
of the same truth is noticed. You can educate 
talent; you cannot generate genius. In the 
most unlikely places, from the strangest quarter, 
the man is born with a quality of soul apart. 
In every region of thought the period of de- 
cadence has set in when men declare that there 
is no further advance possible. The artist can 
only repeat the past. There can be nothing 
new in art, men have often said— till the new 
appears, the thing that was impossible happens. 
How simple is the new ; the stumbling block is 
always the simplicity. Pretenders strive after 



ioo The Open Door 

outre effects making up for the want of real 
originality by a false sensationalism. All pos- 
sibility in orchestration has been already ex- 
hausted, say musical critics. And pretenders 
seek to demonstrate genius by bizarre combi- 
nations, by making strange and weird noises— 
till the master of song again arises, and music 
spontaneous as the note of a bird is once more 
heard in the land. There may be nothing new 
in the methods and materials, the old colours 
on the canvas, the old instruments, the painter's 
pencil and the sculptor's chisel, are the same 
as of old. It is the spirit that is new. 

In the highest sphere of all a man comes 
from God with the divine afflatus, with clear 
spiritual susceptibility, with a genius for re- 
ligion, with an unerring instinct for morality 
as a great artist has an instinct for beauty. 
We the faithless ones, with our comfortable 
creed which desires no change and therefore 
asserts there can be no change, rejoice in our 
darkness and call it light. It is as possible for 
us as for the Pharisees to make the higher law 
void by our traditions, by closing our eyes to 
the light which leads us to new ethical re- 



The Doorways of Tradition 101 

sponsibilities, by refusing to believe that there 
is an open door for our generation. The 
danger of tradition becomes greater from the 
very lapse of time. The Gospel which came 
as new life becomes like an oft-told tale, the 
revelations that transfigure the world to early 
believers do not seem so wonderful and fresh 
to us. They do not grip us with the same in- 
tensity, and drive us with the same impulse. 
Koutine takes the place of inspiration. We 
trust to the usual and the conventional, to 
tradition rather than to experience, and life 
loses the uplift of a commanding passion. 
What was a new creation seems commonplace 
and trite. We stand at the doorways of tra- 
dition, blind to the open door of our own new 
day. 



V 



The Magic Door 



Enflamed with the study of learning and the admira- 
tion of virtue ; stirred up with high hopes of living to be 
brave men and worthy patriots, dear to God and famous 
to all ages* 

— Milton. 



THE MAGIC DOOR 




OTJTH stands at the magic 
door of life, over which mys- 
tery broods. It never remains 
the same, but seems to alter 
with every different applicant. 
This is not strange, since youth itself does not 
stay the same. We speak of youth as if it 
were alwavs of one texture and colour, whereas 
it is the time of chaotic contradictions. We 
talk of the hopefulness of youth, which is true 
enough, and yet some have known then a bitter 
despair never again equalled. We call it a 
time of impractical radicalism, and yet it is 
curiously conservative. We speak of its blithe 
carelessness, and yet it is sometimes marked by 
moods of brooding sadness. It is like an April 
day flecked with alternate sun and shower. 
Whatever youth does, it does with zest, be- 
lieves more valiantly, doubts more tragically, 

i°5 



106 "The Open Door 

hopes more buoyantly, fears more poignantly 
than ever again. 

All this because it is the time of dawning 
self-expression. It is for the first time fully 
conscious of being alive, and has eaten the 
fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and 
evil. Youth stands before ways that entice in 
every direction. It has the key to the magic 
door. It has a thirst for experience, and every- 
thing depends on how it seeks to slake that 
thirst. Some get drawn off by the urgency of 
passion, and are turned away from the true 
path of life, allured by the fickle lights of 
pleasure. The sacred flame burns itself out 
into dead ashes. To those who escape that 
fate we turn for the world's hope; for the 
inner heat of their nature gets outlet in the 
enthusiasms and ideals that save us from stag- 
nation. They come with their fresh keen in- 
sight, and compel us to review our mouldy 
formulas and tarnished standards. They force 
us out from our timid and sleek securities into 
untrodden ways. 

The phrase is sometimes used of some one 



The Magic Door 107 

who is still young in years that he is taking 
the old maris view of things. It is said not in 
praise, but in blame. There is always a tone 
of reproach or regret in the accusation. We 
mean by it that his mind has become static, 
that he is no longer open to new ideas, and 
that he has ceased to grow. It is not all com- 
mendation when we say that such a one has an 
old head on young shoulders, even when we 
know that he has achieved some of the safety 
that comes from prudence. We feel that he is 
prematurely old, and with all our congratula- 
tion for the appearance of wisdom there is a 
sense of regret as at something untimely, like 
the unexpected death of a child. He has ri- 
pened too soon, and the freshness and promise 
have departed. Youth ought not to be pru- 
dent ; for prudence before its time can be the 
meanest of the virtues. Each age has its nat- 
ural virtues and its common vices. Moralists 
tell us that covetousness is the vice of age. It 
is never a pleasant quality, but in youth it is 
hideous. Better spendthrift youth, careless of 
the future, gaily venturing without undue fore- 
thought, than always calculating advantages 



108 The Open Door 

and always considering the main chance. The 
old man's attitude may not mean any such 
moral obliquity, and may only mean the loss 
of intellectual curiosity and of interest in life. 

Doctors say that old age physically comes 
with the hardening of the arteries, which is 
not in itself a matter of mere time. A man 
may be reasonably young at sixty, and growing 
old at thirty. Intellectually, old age comes 
with the hardening of the brain passages. 
Ideas are crystallized and life has become 
static. The mind cannot adjust itself to a new 
point of view. New evidence has no effect on 
settled positions, and the man is even impatient 
at being asked to reconsider questions. The 
amazing procession of life can pass before lus- 
treless eyes, and make no vivid impression. 
There is a loss of interest, and experience in 
any real sense has ceased. There is no vital 
response to any new appeal. It is like knock- 
ing at the door of an unoccupied house. Once 
more this is not a matter of mere time ; for 
some men old in years have kept their attitude 
of curiosity alert and their interest fresh. 
They have never quite forgotten their first 



The Magic Door 109 

entrance through the magic door. The world 
looks as big as ever, and life seems as signifi- 
cant. We do not find such among those who 
think it a sufficient answer to say to eager 
youth that it is young ; for they know how 
much the world owes to the youthful temper. 

Youth feeds the world with life, not merely 
that it assures physical continuity to the race, 
but also that it keeps alive all spiritual adven- 
ture. Older people sometimes assume a 
patronizing air towards youth, as if they 
looked down from a serene height with pity 
for its inexperience. If all the truth were 
known, there is more envy than pity in the 
attitude. They know that now they are not 
capable of the high enthusiasm, and generous 
ardour, and noble passion, which they affect to 
depreciate. All the time it is by these things 
that we really live ; for youth puts the yeast 
into the whole lump of life that saves it from 
decay. Even the older men who keep alert do 
so far more than they imagine by tapping the 
brains, and using the strength of the younger 
generation. We prey upon our children, and 
suck the blood of our offspring. Life so soon 



no The Open Door 

becomes stereotyped and hardens into settled 
grooves, and only youth has the courage to 
break the moulds. 

The elder among us like to speak of the 
value of experience^ and of course it has a great 
value, but not as we often mean by it. It is 
nothing in itself to have come through a great 
many things. We look on experience as cap- 
ital, which can be put out to interest and earn 
us a living without any further effort. Capital 
so treated often takes wings and flies away, 
and the capitalist wakes up to find his re- 
sources gone. Experience so treated ceases to 
have any value. It has become conventional 
and stereotyped, and does not apply to the new 
conditions. This is one reason why youth is 
often impatient at the pratings about experi- 
ence. It seems to have no earthly relation to 
the particular situation with which we are 
faced. It is antiquated knowledge, and has 
not been brought up to date. 

What is experience, on which age puts such 
mystical value ? We think of it as something 
definite like money in our pocket. It is really 



The Magic Door m 

the interpretation of life, and to be true and of 
any value must change as life itself keeps 
changing. Coleridge somewhere likens expe- 
rience to the stern light of a ship at sea, which 
illumines the track that has been passed over, 
but does nothing to lighten the course to be 
traversed. It is a fit description of much that 
passes for experience. There ought to be a 
residuum of wisdom left, a training in judgment 
and character able to be applied to other and 
new occasions. When this is the case it is a 
valuable contribution. Age as a rule does not 
really have experience, though it may once 
have had it. It is youth which has experience, 
as it actually tries out its new opportunities, 
and meets its new situations, and grapples with 
its new problems, and is hand to hand with life. 
Knowledge of the ancient doorways of tradi- 
tion is not all that is needed ; for youth is led 
to ways that look like the old and yet some- 
how have changed. 

Youth therefore ought to be adventurous, 
since the life that lies before us is all an adven- 
ture. It has never been lived before, and none 
can ever forecast it. The world never can go 



112 The Open Door 

back over the way by which it has come, and has 
not passed this way heretofore. It moves to 
untried paths, and above all its needs it stands 
in need of path-finders. The glorious idealism 
of youth is its greatest asset. Youth ought to 
be radical, asking its insistent questions, even 
pouring its contempt on our smug ways and 
respectable institutions. We sometimes blame 
young men for being opinionative, and self- 
willed, and too fond of airing their own notions 
of things, and too individual in their attitude. 
As a matter of fact they are too easily brow- 
beaten into compliance with the conventional, 
too soon licked into the usual shape, too afraid 
of being themselves. The world is full of con- 
formists, thinking, saying, acting the usual. 
The poet that was in all of us dies too young. 
"We need more non-conformists, more men 
ready to protest, because their eyes have seen a 
nobler vision. It would be a poor thing to 
have youth prudent with the selfish cal- 
culating prudence of worldly wisdom. Life 
stretches out at the feet of youth to be made 
what it will. It can be as rich and beautiful 
as youth likes to have it. 



The Magic Door 113 

This is the Magic Door, that ushers to the 
very land of dreams. We have seen that the 
world is not any one thing but is as big as we 
are able to use, and life can be anything we 
have the faith and courage and knowledge to 
make it. The place of a man in the spiritual 
kingdom is settled not by his graces, nor by his 
attainments, nor even by his actions in them- 
selves, but by his will. Ultimately what a 
man wills to do, he does, and what he desires 
he receives. What he bends his heart to reach 
comes sooner or later to his hand. It is truly 
a magic door, if we get at it what we demand. 
This is our serious statement, that what we re- 
quest is given to us, and what we really will in 
our hearts we attain. Life comes and says calmly 
and confidently, " Ask what I shall give you," and 
the door opens out into the place of our asking. 

This may seem at first an absurd statement 
that what a man seeks he finds, and where he 
knocks it is opened to him, but if we think a 
little we will see that it is true. We may not 
get the exact thing we most desire. The 
particular object on which we have set our 
hearts may be to the end out of our reach, but 



ii4 The Open Door 

we get along the line of our desire. The 
farmer who sows wheat may not get as much 
wheat at the harvest as he would like (what 
farmer ever does get as much as that ?) — but he 
will get nothing else than wheat. He never 
expects to get oats, where he sowed wheat. 
If a man has set his heart on the world he may 
not get as many of the things of the world as 
will satisfy him (what man ever does get 
that ? ) — but he will get nothing else than the 
things of the world. If he is bent on the satis- 
faction of the earthly appetites and desires, he 
will get that to some extent, though afterwards 
he may discover that his request has brought 
with it leanness of soul, and an empty life. But 
he will get nothing else. Let us be reasonable, 
how can we expect anything else ? To choose 
the world as our portion is to get it, — at least 
it is to limit our resources to purely worldly 
ones. To choose the higher life of the things 
of the mind and of the soul as our portion is to 
get them, to open up our heart to intellectual 
and spiritual joys. There is no promise also of 
the things which the worldly man enjoys. 
That was not our request. 



The Magic Door 115 

The point of distinction is the quality of the 
request, the kind of satisfaction the soul puts 
before it. It does not mean that the worldly 
man will be successful in all his earthly ventures, 
and will be satiated in every fleshly desire. 
Merely, that if he is not satisfied there he can 
be satisfied nowhere ; for nowhere else has 
he sowed for a harvest. It does not mean 
that the spiritual man will have every prayer 
even for spiritual blessing answered exactly 
as he asks, but that where he has put his 
heart he will find his life. If his aim is to 
attain to his own ideal, if he seeks growth in 
gracious life, in noble character, in generous 
service, all that is the kind of harvest he will 
reap. One special prayer may not be answered, 
for the very reason that it would not be along 
the line of his usual desire. If he is bent on 
character, he will enrich and sweeten character. 
If he is bent on communion, he will have his 
soul lifted up to the very presence of God 
some time. The saint's trial is that the means 
often seems so unlike the end he seeks and 
prays for. But let him be sure that the law 
holds good. 



n6 The Open Door 

There is nothing magical on either side. We 
call it a Magic Door, because there is no magic 
in the world. It is one of the unchastened 
dreams of the human heart to possess some 
talisman to gratify every desire as it arises, a 
magic carpet of the Arabian Nights' Entertain- 
ment to transport us anywhere at will, a magic 
lamp which at a rub will evoke unseen powers to 
do our bidding, a magic word to open the world's 
treasure-trove. That is an idle and somewhat 
childish dream, but it is true nevertheless that 
we already possess as much power over our 
lives. What we lust after, what we give up 
our heart to, what we really request from life, 
what we desire as our chief good and foster in 
our thoughts as the imperious need of our hearts, 
that we cannot but get. When we make our 
deliberate, conscious, persistent choice, we are 
launching a cause that cannot fail of its effect. 

This is the birth of sin, not in the act, but in 
the desire. It is here is its guilt, as it is here 
is the possibility of escape from it. An evil 
will only needs opportunity to blossom out into 
the full-blown crime, or vice, or cruelty, or 
shame. The sin is in the selfishness which lusted 



The Magic Door 117 

exceedingly. It only lacks an opportunity ; 
and the opportunity cannot be kept from us for- 
ever. In a sense the evil is already done, when 
the heart is given up to it. Like strong-headed 
oxen we pull at the yoke, pull and at last get 
clear — to our own undoing. Sooner or later 
we have our way. We persist, we seek it, we 
will have it. It is as if life said to us to take 
it — the sin and the curse, the desire and the 
sting. 

Not vindictively, not as a punishment, not in 
revenge, a petulant revenge for the willfulness 
that cannot be curbed. No, but because that is 
the inevitable consequence ; that is of the very 
nature of the case. Our hope lies in this. That 
leanness of soul may send us, who have had this 
terrible success, through very loathing to change 
the current of our desires, to set our affections 
not on the selfish worldly ambitions, but on the 
higher things. The wasting sickness may turn 
our hearts from the broken cisterns that hold 
no water, to the true water of life, and here- 
after we may live with whatsoever things are 
true, and honest, and just, and pure, and lovely, 
and of good report. For there is a place of 



n8 The Open Door 

escape. The point of departure for each of us 
is in the will. 

The great question then comes to be that we 
should ask ourselves what our will is. If our 
heart were unveiled, what would be seen there 
at the bottom as the foundation of our scheme 
of life ? The question is not whether we have 
passed a blameless life, and can stand in con- 
scious rectitude, not whether we have faltered 
and fallen by the way and have come short of 
our own ideal. The question has to do with the 
bent, and bias, and direction of our life. Have 
we chosen the better part, the part our own 
heart tells us to be best ? If so, we may be 
sure that we will get what we have chosen, and 
more, a richer apprehension and a fuller pos- 
session of goodness and beauty and truth. Or, 
has our ideal of life been a purely selfish one, of 
pleasure or ambition or low desire ? Has our 
best vision gone out of our life these last years 
since the world took such hold on us, as the 
sunshine creeps out of the valley? What is 
our will in this great matter of life ? Can it 
be defined in the scathing pitiless condemnation 
as only some variant of the lust of the flesh, 



The Magic Door 119 

the lust of the eye, and the pride of life ? In 
this great rich wonderful world of God, 

Where all men's prayers to Thee raised 
Eeturn possessed of what they pray Thee, 

on this earth made beautiful with the beauty 
of holiness, the scene of love and redemption, 
the place of noble life and sometimes nobler 
death, have we only asked for the poor and the 
petty, and have been paid the price of our 
prayer — a small, shrunk, lean, and loathly soul ? 
What have we been asking — cmd getting — in 
our ceaseless prayer for life ? 

The world responds to asking, though not to 
wishing. It is a rich world that knows no re- 
spect of persons, but gives us each what we 
most desire. True we may never get as much 
as we desire, but only along the line of our de- 
sire can we get at all. Nothing of value is 
ever got without its price, but if we are willing 
to pay the price it can be had, and the price is 
that we should ask. The Arabian Nights' con- 
ception of the world is a far poorer thought of 
it than the reality. We learn that the universe 



120 The Open Door 

has a moral and causal base, and that the ask- 
ing to which it responds is far other than idle 
wishing. To ask for a thing in this cosmic 
sense means to bend heart and mind to it, to 
foster it as the imperious need of life, to be 
ready to sacrifice all else for it. What a man 
seeks in such fashion he cannot fail to find. 
We can rely on the law of cause and effect. If 
a man applies himself exclusively to money- 
making, one hopes that he will make a lot ; for 
it is certain that he will make nothing else. 
The material success may not be very con- 
spicuous, but the making of the man will be ac- 
cording to his ideal. 

In our usual calculations we count on the 
working of this principle. The world has 
eternal justice at its heart, and we reap the 
measure of our sowing. William James sums 
up one of the chapters of his Text-book of Psy- 
chology with this encouraging statement, " Let 
no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of 
his education, whatever the line of it may be. 
If he keep faithfully busy each hour of the 
working day, he may safely leave the final re- 
sult to itself. He can with perfect certainty 



The Magic Door 121 

count on waking up some fine morning to find 
himself one of the competent ones of his gener- 
ation in whatever pursuit he may have singled 
out. Silently, between all the details of his 
business, the power of judging in all that class 
of matter will have built itself up within him 
as a possession that will never pass away. 
Young people should know this truth in ad- 
vance. The ignorance of it has probably en- 
gendered more discouragement and faintheart- 
edness in youths embarking on arduous careers 
than all other causes put together." 

We are paid in the current coin of our own 
ideal. If we know what we want from the 
world and have made up our mind as to the 
chief end of life, the door opens to us. This is 
why our ideal is of more importance than even 
our present real. The one has the shaping of 
the other. The hope of the world lies with 
those we call visionaries, who kick at our treas- 
ured customs and ideas and inspirations, who 
plan their spacious schemes of reform, who 
dream dreams and see visions. It lies with the 
very men who have to suffer from our ancient 
gibes about enthusiasm and youthful ignorance. 



122 The Open Door 

Without them everything tends to degradation, 
in politics and business and art and religion and 
social life. They have insight because they 
have outlook. We pass our inane judgments 
about Utopia and Castles in Spain, when 
idealism is really the life of all that lives in 
man. There might be some sense in asking 
youth to give up its ideals, if we could point 
to a state of affairs that was less of a stupid 
muddle than our present condition. Rather 
we might well welcome the youthful enthu- 
siasm, which hopes and dares, and which above 
all sees. Even with our purblind eyes we 
recognize the tragedy when youth sells its 
birthright for a mess of pottage. The tacit 
assumption which we so easily make, that long 
established wrong must remain, is responsible 
for much of the world's misery. We refuse to 
believe that we can make of human life and 
human society what it is in our heart to make 
it. Nothing can be done until we get our 
vision right and cherish the true ideal. 

The real value of a life is its central faith, 
not as propositions of a creed but the affirma- 



The Magic Door 123 

tion it makes to the world. Our faith is our 
general spiritual attitude, and a life can only 
be justified by faith. Our true worth must be 
found in this region, not in those vulgar stand- 
ards by which we commonly judge success. 
Usually we have no time and little inclination 
to consider anything but the logic of facts, and 
so our judgments are rough and ready, con- 
fined mostly to the surface of men and things. 
We are tempted to take men at their own 
valuation, and even when we do not, as often 
as not we lay the stress on the wrong quality. 
If we escape the more sordid estimates of 
wealth or position, we may substitute as un- 
trustworthy measurements such as talents or 
even the work done. 

It is certainly getting nearer the mark to 
place men according to their achievements ; 
for though a man does not merit credit for his 
gifts he does for his use of them. Were the 
talents put out to the best usury, or were they 
hid in the earth ? Were the gifts of fortune 
and person used for the highest purposes, or 
were they neglected, or squandered on self? 
The answer to this question will reveal much- 



124 The Open Door 

Industry, perseverance, plodding patience, are 
looked down on as inferior qualities. Our 
pinchbeck geniuses sneer at them as of lower 
standing, but after all they are the only quali- 
ties for which a man has the smallest ground 
of pride. The man, who can point to his tale 
of bricks skillfully and honestly made, has 
something to go upon. Work done must al- 
ways receive its meed of praise. Even in re- 
ligion good works represent the great object 
which must ever be kept in view. And as it 
is the end so is it the ultimate test, " By their 
fruits ye shall know them." A candidate for 
ordination, when asked for the doctrine of the 
Anglican church on good works, replied with 
commendable caution, " A few of them would 
not do a man any harm." 

At the same time the standard of work is a 
very outside one to apply to such a subtle and 
complex thing as life. After all, the quality 
of perseverance is itself to some extent a gift 
of temperament. It may also be the result of 
a very poor ambition, due to the sordid desire 
to get on in the world. By their fruits men 
are known, but what are their fruits ? Not 



The Magic Door 125 

surely only those things which we can see, and 
touch, and speak about. The true test of life 
is not outward — possessions, or gifts of brain, 
or work, or results of any kind. In the region 
of morals, motive counts for more than act. 
True works must in the end spring from true 
motive, because of course a man whose motives 
are always right cannot be always wrong in 
his actions. Good fruit will come from the 
good tree, but we are often indifferent judges 
of what constitutes good fruit. It is not al- 
ways what is fair to the eye and pleasant to 
the taste. 

A life is judged by its ideal, not by what we 
think its real. A man is judged by what he 
aims at, rather than by what he achieves. A 
life is judged by its intention, its bent, its 
bias, its spirit. Not what are our works — for 
these we are well paid otherwise, they do not 
fail of their market value — but what is our 
faith ? Not what we have done, but in what 
spirit have we done it ? Not what we have 
attained, but what have we attempted ? Not 
what we grasp but what we have reached out 
to, the quest not the conquest, the attempt not 



126 The Open Door 

the attainment, the vision not the possession, 
the dream not the fulfillment. 

All instincts immature 

All purposes unsure 

Thoughts hardly to be packed 

Into a narrow act, 

Fancies that broke through language and 

escaped ; 
All I could never be, 
All men ignored in me, 
This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the 

pitcher shaped. 

The idealism of youth justifies itself by its re- 
sults, and it is also in line with the truest phi- 
losophy of life. It is the creative spirit of man, 
which fashions the world and turns it into a 
habitable home, compelling blind forces to go 
our way and yield to our ends. Idealism holds 
the key to the Magic Door. 



VI 
The Lure of the Open Door 



The meagre, stale, forbidden ways 
Of custom, law, and statute, took at once 
The attraction of a country in romance, 

— Wordsworth* 



YI 
THE LURE OF THE OPEN DOOR 




HERE is an elusive quality in 
life, which tempts us on to 
essay some new venture. If 
it were not for this, we would 
rarely have courage to let go 
accustomed moorings. The innate conserva- 
tism of human nature and the natural inertia 
of society hold us fast to the usual. It needs 
a strong pull to drag us from the known to 
face the unknown. Some of that pull comes 
from the lure of the Open Door. Even our con- 
stant desire to be safe and sane cannot always 
resist the happy temptation to try our fortune 
through the glimmering portals that invite us. 
But for this the innovation would have less 
chance than even it has, though the chance 
sometimes seems slim enough as it is. Com- 
monly we want to be let alone, and it is part 
of our stock of wisdom to let well, and for that 

part ill, alone. On the whole we comfort our- 

129 



130 The Open Door 

selves with our proverbs that it is wise to let 
sleeping dogs lie. Our early interest and curi- 
osity about the world soon gets dulled, and the 
spirit of investigation gets blunted. The gen- 
eral tendency is ever towards the static, if not 
towards the stagnant. But for this other op- 
posing force we would seldom have the courage 
to shake off apathy and cut loose from custom. 
Without it we might never venture, and would 
never win. 

Our attempts towards progress and our wel- 
come of the new^ half-hearted enough as they 
often are, do not give much cause for self-ela- 
tion. They are not all due to any virtue in us, 
but are also sometimes from necessity. The 
world has a way of driving us, when we will 
not be led. The nest gets rudely shaken, and 
we are thrown out to find new shelter. The 
sleek and smooth life dreams only of green pas- 
tures and quiet waters, and would find no place 
for any dark valley of shadow, but events will 
not allow us secure possession of peace. When 
change is forced on us, we sigh for rest and 
protest against the whirling universe. We 
find that we have no real security of tenure 



The Lure of the Open Door 131 

and are open to the shock of storm and to the 
stress of change. Life is kinder to us than we 
would be ourselves; for the high things of 
man's nature have been forced on him. 

The sense of pilgrimage which man has ever 
had was brought to him perforce, and the 
deeper meaning of it was given through neces- 
sity. It is part of the world's great debt to 
the Jews that their history compelled the spir- 
itual ideal which is now our possession. The 
homeless, landless race, that in spite of exile 
had ever the dream of home in their hearts, 
had learned the bitterness of being uprooted 
and transplanted. The people of all known to 
history most devoted to one spot of earth, re- 
fusing to call any other place home, most stub- 
born in their geographical patriotism, seemed 
to be the very people chosen by fate to be most 
scattered over the face of the earth. It is the 
satire of history, if there were not more than 
satire in it. Through the homelessness, the 
deeper truth of a larger home for the heart 
of man was taught. It was to choice spirits 
among these alien exiled Jews living as stran- 
gers, scattered throughout the world, came the 



132 The Open Door 

assurance of a country of the soul, a native 
land of the spirit, safe from intruder and op- 
pressor. A later writer of their race points 
the contrast between their dispersed and home- 
less state, and the possible inheritance incor- 
ruptible and undefiled and that fadeth not 
away. 

It is a common enough thing to speak of life 
as a pilgrimage. The shortness of life, its 
changes, its fatalities, have ever impressed and 
oppressed the heart of man. This at least is 
forced in on the mind of all men who think, 
that here we have no abiding city. Life is but 
a pilgrimage, as of a wayfaring man, a stran- 
ger in a strange land passing through — out of 
the deep into the deep. " I depart from life," 
said Cicero in De Senectute, " as from an inn, 
not as from a house ; for nature has given us a 
lodging wherein to tarry but not to dwell." It 
is not a house but an inn, not a home but a 
hotel, not an abiding place but a lodging place 
of wayfaring men. This figure of the world 
as an inn expresses the thought of pilgrimage, 
and it is a figure not unknown to literature, as 
in Omar Khayyam : 



The Lure of the Open Door 133 

Think in this battered caravanserai, 
Whose portals are alternate night and day, 
How Sultan after Sultan with his pomp 
Abode his destined hour, and went his way. 

It was burnt into Israel by their history. 
The sense of pilgrimage was in the life of all 
their great and good men of old through sheer 
necessity. Abraham went out from home and 
kindred not knowing whither he went, and all 
his life he was merely the heir of a promise. 
He sojourned in the land of promise as in a 
strange country, dwelling in tabernacles ; for 
he looked for a city which hath foundations 
whose builder and maker is God. Isaac and 
Jacob lived and died heirs with him of the 
same promise. They all died in faith, without 
fulfillment, not having received the promises, 
confessing that they were strangers and pil- 
grims on the earth — ever seeking a country, 
never finding it, but seeing it only afar off. 
Moses was a stranger in the land of Midian, 
not allowed to have roots even in Egypt, for- 
eign country as it was. The race was homeless 
for generations. The Promised Land was held 
before their eyes as a dream and when at last 



134 The Open Door 

it was attained it was only to find that in a 
deeper and more spiritual sense the Promised 
Land lay still in front. They were never al- 
lowed to forget that they had been strangers 
in the land of Egypt. The lees were ever 
shaken. The nest was ever stirred and scat- 
tered, and the fledglings thrown out. Could 
they forget that they had only a house of pil- 
grimage ? On the threshing-floor of Assyria 
and Babylon they were threshed and thrown 
up against a high wind and scattered. Chil- 
dren of the Dispersion they have been ever 
since. 

It is the lesson of the elusiveness of life, a 
parable in action of the world. Their experi- 
ence became the heritage of man as a spiritual 
being, and the heart responds to the appeal of 
pilgrimage that the present is not our home, 
only an inn, a battered Caravanserai, a lodging 
place of wayfaring men : if we are not to be 
homeless forever, we must desire a better coun- 
try, look for a city that hath foundations. 
Idealism which keeps the soul alive in us at- 
tests the innate faith of man in his destiny. 



The Lure of the Open Door 135 

The lure of the Open Door is part of the lure 
of the future. A future of some kind is needed 
for life ; for we are not only saved, we are kept 
living by hope. For all real purposes life has 
ceased when there has ceased to be a future. 
To have no future, no to-morrow, is to empty 
life of what makes it life. Existence may go 
on, but living has ended. When the future 
means merely the passage of time, days and 
nights, it is death already. " Abandon hope " 
is the motto over the entrance to the Inferno, 
not over the entrance to any human habita- 
tion. For the great purpose of the Exile to 
which we have referred it was necessary that 
the exiles should be sure that they had a future 
and a hope. Otherwise they would have 
dwindled away among the heathen and ceased 
to be a distinctive people, giving up faith alto- 
gether ; and the great education of Israel would 
have been lost to the world. For the weary 
years to come, as generation passed away after 
generation, hope had to spring eternal in the 
heart of the nation ; they had to keep believing 
and to keep expecting, or the fate of the lost 
tribes would be theirs, and the last chance for 



136 The Open Door 

Israel would be gone. The spiritual life of the 
Old Testament could not have gone on without 
a future and a hope. 

No life to be called life can go on without it. 

To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow, 
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, 
To the last syllable of recorded time ; 
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools 
The way to dusty death. 

When that is the tone and temper of life it is 
nearing its end. Both for the individual and 
for the race, hope is the inspiring force. It 
may be illusion, the fraudulent scheme of nature 
to achieve her own purposes, but at any rate it 
is there, a light to lead men on. From the first 
early days when the youth blows bubbles out 
of soap and water and sees wonderful visions 
in them, the future entices and allures. The 
young man has a future, and if no longer the 
child's dream of pleasures and palaces, a future 
of power and influence. He will achieve some- 
thing, get something, do something, be some- 
thing. When he loses his dream he loses his 
youth. 

A future is necessary to a man in every 



The Lure of the Open Door 137 

branch of activity. It is necessary not only 
for success, but also for a reasonable existence 
in that particular sphere. The business man 
has a future : he has his legitimate business am- 
bitions and hopes. The true scholar has a fu- 
ture, in which greater knowledge will be gath- 
ered, problems be solved and the world be bet- 
tered by his knowledge : it is when he loses 
sight of the future that he becomes a mere 
repository of the dry bones of dead theories, 
instead of the possessor of living knowledge. 
The artist has a future, a vision of unrealized 
beauty before his eyes, an ideal in his heart. 
It may bring ever a haunting sense of pain ; it 
may seem sometimes like the agony of a dumb 
man to speak, but the highest things do not 
bring unmixed bliss. It is when he ceases to 
have his future that he can become an art-critic 
by a prescribed rule of three, or a pot-boiler for 
a Philistine market. 

The man who has no to-morrow can become 
a suicide, if he have a keen enough perception 
of the fact that for him life has ended already. 
At bottom everything depends on hope. Let a 
man keep his expected end and he will labour 



138 The Open Door 

and plan and think, and if need be scorn de- 
lights and live laborious days. Kill hope in 
man and his life loses coherence, meaning, pur- 
pose. The mainspring of it is gone : the heart 
is taken out of it, and true activity dies. "When 
all else is taken away, all that men cherish and 
desire, all the natural joy and light of life, 
however dark it be in the present, if hope be 
left, " there is a budding morrow in midnight." 
The quality of the hope is the measure of the 
life. We can accurately judge ourselves by the 
colour our future takes to us, and by the kind 
of lure to which we are responding. If we are 
honest and sincere enough to acknowledge our 
real ambitions and desires and declare to our- 
selves the sort of hope which is the mainspring 
of our action, we at last know ourselves. Our 
ambitions may be unworthy not because they 
are evil in themselves but because they are 
inadequate. We are built on too big a scale to 
be satisfied with little ends and petty hopes. 
The tragedy of loving the world and what are 
called the things of the world is not that the 
world is evil but that it is transient. It does 
not last ; it passes away and its lust and love. 



The Lure of the Open Door 139 

To build the life wholly there is to build on 
sand for a foundation. In the long run our 
worth as men is a spiritual value. Anything 
else is to make life a beggarly gathering of 
husks, the husks that the swine do eat. The 
true lure of the Open Door touches our future 
with a light that never was on sea or land, so 
that life is ennobled by high thoughts and great 
passions and generous aspirations. 

It may be that some readers may complain 
of the figure of the Open Door as vague, and 
may feel that the vagueness is not confined to 
the title. There may be no real answer in 
saying that it was chosen because it was vague, 
but it is a true answer. It needs to be vague if 
it is going to appeal to all of us with our varied 
circumstances. It is purposely vague, that we 
may translate it for our own needs and interpret 
it for our own life. We make an idol of what 
we call the practical, and think that all counsel 
worth while must be in detail. The truth is 
that the details never fit other situations ; 
for life never duplicates itself. Life does not 
run in straight lines but breaks through 



140 The Open Door 

and over all our containing and confining 
formulas. There is an appearance of great 
lucidity in the treatment of some subjects 
by division into neat little compartments under 
four or five heads. That may be convenient 
and useful, and no harm is done provided that 
we do not assume that the subject is exhausted 
by our analysis. 

Another of our intellectual superstitions is 
that to have proper definitions is the way to 
concord and agreement. It is a commonplace 
to say that, if we will only define our terms 
and keep on defining them, there would be an 
end to our intellectual squabbles, as there would 
be nothing to fight about. It is strange that 
we should think this, since it is the opposite of 
all our experience. As a matter of fact it is 
usually at the moment when we begin to define 
that we begin to fight. Take for example the 
Church, about which so much warfare has been 
waged. We all know what the Church is as 
the instrument for the coming of the Kingdom 
on earth, and we can all praise and pray and 
worship and work together on that general 
basis. As soon as we begin to define it in our 



The Lure of the Open Door 141 

creeds and stand by our high or low or broad 
doctrine of it, the fight begins. In Union 
Theological Seminary, New York, there are 
more than twenty different denominations rep- 
resented in the student body, studying to be 
ministers of the various churches, and it is a 
gracious sign of the times that this should be 
possible. They have no difficulty in knowing 
what the Church is, because they see it in the 
mass and not as a logical definition. 

All the great things in life are vague because 
they are too big to be put in a definition. How 
will we define truth, or honour, or love ? So 
with the attitude of hope suggested by the 
figure of the Open Door. We can translate it 
for our own needs, and can apply it to our own 
situation however special it may seem. It may 
come as a word of hope and comfort at a time 
when we are inclined to bemoan the past and 
to be half afraid of the future. We may look 
back with regret and remorse at what we have 
missed and what we have lost and what we in 
folly have thrown away, and the coming days 
are dark before us. It is much to know that 
we have new opportunity, and a fresh chance 



142 The Open Door 

to redeem the time. We have been unprofitable 
servants and faithless stewards, but we may 
serve yet, and may still prove worthy. If the 
thought of the past is a misery because of its 
barrenness, there is a door out of the past with 
all its failure and sorrow and sin. If we feel 
hampered and limited so that we can hardly 
believe that there can be for us a future worth 
having, there is an escape from all that hinders 
and entangles, a way out of all that narrow r s 
and cramps. Life, like the world, is not static 
but dynamic, and there are forces that liberate 
and redeem. "We can interpret the promise by 
our brightest hopes, leaving our figure in its 
vague grandeur ; for it means hope and we are 
saved by hope. There is a door out of the 
dark into the light, out of the storm into peace, 
out of fear into courage, out of bondage into 
liberty, out of distress into joy. We need not 
walk forever under a leaden sky and on a 
sodden earth, shut in by an ever narrowing 
horizon. We can translate it how we will, and 
paint it as big and as broad and as glorious as 
we like. There is a door into a spacious place, 
into a fresh accession of pow r er, into the house 



The Lure of the Open Door 143 

of our hearts, the place of our prayers and 
aspirations. 

Perhaps the objection of some is not that the 
promise is vague and general, but that it con- 
flicts with experience. They are growing 
cautious and refuse to be lured on by idle 
hopes. It will only be as before, and nothing 
much comes of entering anywhere. They 
never seem to get nearer the heart of things 
and always seem to be outside, even when they 
have gone through what looked like an open 
door. The trouble here seems to be that so 
many of us will insist on viewing life as some- 
thing static. An experience is looked on as 
something to have and to have done with. 
The realization of a hope means to them reach- 
ing a place where they can stay. Even religion 
means getting something and then getting over 
it. So, everywhere we find people trying to 
live on some past experience. It is always 
something that has been to them, not some- 
thing that is, and is to be. They think only 
of arriving and then remaining. All that is 
vain endeavour in a world which is the product 



144 The Open Door 

of ceaseless force and in life which never 
remains. No wonder they always feel outside. 

That is where we ought always to be, still 
with something beyond us, something just 
ahead of us. Nowhere does our static view 
play such mischief as in the region of religion. 
The very sacredness of the subject induces us 
to think of it as fixed and permanent, as some- 
thing which cannot be touched. It comes to 
be a kind of impiety to criticize or to suggest 
that at any one place it can be altered. Places 
and days and creeds and books and institutions 
become sacred, to be viewed with awe as things 
apart. They may well be considered sacred in 
the true sense, valued and used as enriched by 
their gracious associations, but not with the 
superstitious reverence which sets them out of 
the stream of life. The fatal result is that 
religion itself becomes a thing apart from real 
life. 

It is all part of the struggle between the life 
and the institution which we see everywhere. 
A great vision of liberty creates for a country 
a noble constitution, which then gets on a 
pedestal, and in time endangers the very liberty 



The Lure of the Open Door 145 

which produced it. A deep sense of justice 
creates laws, which may later minister often to 
injustice. A great religious experience pro- 
duces a literature fragrant with the dew of 
living religion, and the literature can be used 
to darken and depress all further experience. 
Religious thought constructs a magnificent 
creed which adequately represents the thinking 
of its day, and then the creed can become an 
instrument to throttle thought and chain the 
mind of man. Eeligious life creates a church 
with its offices and rites and forms, and the 
church can become the enemy of true religion. 
Life everywhere naturally and of necessity 
embodies itself in institutions, but the institution 
often tries to kill the life that bore it. All be- 
cause we think in terms of statics and try to 
stop short, when there is no stopping place at 
all. 

It is here that the lure of the Open Door is 
so necessary. Life must be allowed to go on 
creating the institutions needed now. For all 
real purposes it has become death when we 
refuse to let it change and alter according to its 
needs. We can live for a time on our capital 



146 The Open Door 

politically and morally and spiritually, but it is 
only an uneasy semblance of real life. "We 
can blunder along by the momentum of the 
past, but we cannot even blunder far till the 
machine breaks down. Our new thoughts of 
freedom must reconstruct for us new forms for 
government and for industry. Our new ideals 
of justice and new compunctions about injustice 
must embody themselves in juster laws and 
fairer conditions. Our new vision must realize 
itself in a social structure that will stand the 
stress and strain better. Our vital religion 
must revive and renew its institutions for the 
living needs of our day. Timid conservative 
souls dread change, but it is their only chance 
for life that they be exposed to the full blast of 
the spiritual forces that sweep through our 
world. 

So in the personal life it is no objection that 
they never seem to attain when they have 
moved forward once to the lure of the Open 
Door, and that they are still outside. Of course 
they are ; for that is where they should be. 
The whole life of faith is a series of new be- 
ginnings. We cannot live off last year's ex- 



The Lure of the Open Door 147 

perience any more than off yesterday's dinner. 
In religion we seem to think that it is enough 
to have had one experience of forgiveness or 
love or joy, and then we are done with it. We 
even speak of getting religion as a man falls 
into a fortune which he can now put out to 
interest. Bather it is a series of new begin- 
nings — new repentance, new hope, new faith, 
new love, new insight, new obedience, new 
service, accepting new opportunities. It is not 
entering once for all through a door into rest 
and peace, and quiescence of soul, and torpidity 
of life. "Not as though I had attained, or 
were already perfect, but I follow after," cried 
Paul as he pressed towards still another open 
door of faith and service. We can face the 
future with bright hope, if we will accept the 
primal faith that life has a genuine and gra- 
cious meaning, and the world has at its heart a 
purpose of good. If hopes may be dupes it is 
also true that fears may be liars, and it is 
better even to be duped with hope than to be- 
come craven with fear. We can believe, and 
can live out the faith, that there is a sphere 
for us, and a discipline, and a place in the 



148 The Open Door 

great purpose of love. By living out that 
faith, we put it to the test of truth, and find 
that it proves itself in life. 

Our most imminent danger is to assume that 
the elusive quality of life is merely illusion. 
We do not want to be silly dupes, led blindly 
to empty ends. "When we have responded to 
the lure, we are tempted to be contemptuous of 
our own foolishness in expecting too much. 
We are disillusioned, and the whole moral tone 
suffers from the shock. This exhaustion of 
feeling with similar weakening of morale can 
be easily parallelled, not only in the history of 
nations, but in the experience of all of us who 
have experienced anything. In times of exalta- 
tion life is easy, and faith is natural in the 
pleasant exercise of hope and joy. Nothing is 
hard in such times when the meagre stale ways 
of custom take the attraction of a country of 
romance. In the first flush of triumph, in the 
inspiration of a great resolve, in the glow of an 
ardent consecration, it is easy to mount on 
wings as eagles, to run and not be weary ; but 
when the task pulls itself out in seemingly end- 



The Lure of the Open Door 149 

less length, when the road winds up over the 
rugged shoulder of the hill, when the glory of 
the vision fades into the common light of day, 
then comes the constant trial of endurance, and 
it is hard even to walk and not faint. 

It is common in history to find spasms of 
great feeling succeeded by times of disillusion- 
ment, as if emotion had spent itself. An age 
of faith is often followed by an age of in- 
difference, and after a period of reformation 
men often lose heart as to the value of what 
has been done. The road which led for a time 
in the clear crisp air of the uplands comes down 
again to the low levels. When a nation passes 
through a great trial and a great triumph, en- 
thusiasm runs high, but when the glow of the 
triumph wears off and only the exhaustion of 
the trial is left, the real time of difficulty 
comes. Disappointment breeds doubt, or de- 
spair. The uplifting inspiration is gone and 
the experience seems only as a tale that is told. 

In some directions this can be said of the 
present time in which we live. Men to whom 
a form was once living find that it no longer 
expresses the same meaning to them, and yet 



150 The Open Door 

they have not got it filled with new meaning. 
They stick to the form in a lifeless way, or else, 
it may be, they discard it altogether. To 
many the Christian doctrines and worship 
are meaningless because they have been dis- 
illusioned. They find nothing in them com- 
mensurate with the promise of religion. They 
have lost faith all round, and the mood reflects 
itself in every sphere of life. We no longer 
believe with the simple faith of old, nor expect 
such great things. Early faith has been 
clouded and high effort paralyzed by the hard 
facts of experience. 

In political economy men, who began with an 
implicit trust in the law of progress, see how 
little has been effected by even a great reform. 
They are disappointed by the small results, and 
are easily tempted to cease striving for more. 
In education men, who began with a complete 
trust in the power of education to redeem life 
from grossness, see how little change a genera- 
tion of it has made in the life of the people, 
and are no longer inspired with their first ideal. 
In science men, who were fired with the hope 
of all that might be done by extracting the 



The Lure of the Open Door 151 

secrets of nature and harnessing her hidden 
powers to the use of man, see how all the elec- 
trical and mechanical inventions of our age can 
leave human life in essence where it was, and 
so they give themselves up to the material side 
of science, looking upon their first ideal as a 
day-dream. In religion men, who began with 
the heavenly vision and a sense of high conse- 
cration, learn how hard it is to keep the heights, 
and are disillusioned as they slide slowly into 
conformity with their environment. It is diffi- 
cult to keep our faith in anything, and so the 
worldly and careless life finds many and easy 
victims. 

The terrible disillusionment of life ! Is there 
a sphere which escapes the lowering process, a 
region of thought or work, a relationship, even 
the holiest, where the degradation is not pos- 
sible ? Business, religion, friendship, marriage, 
personal honour, social service, in each separate 
department of life, there can be deterioration 
of ideal. Everywhere there are shipwrecks of 
lives that seemed safe by the early vision. We 
see high ardour quenched, blazing zeal grow 
cold, early faith fail, enthusiasm dwindle, the 



152 The Open Door 

glory die out of youthful eyes. We see once 
eager recruits drop out of the ranks. We see 
those who aimed at high emprise become con- 
tent with commonplace ways. The young 
man, whose heart has been filled with the pas- 
sion of discipleship, cannot imagine himself in 
this state of indifference, but it is well to warn 
him that it may be so. The stage of something 
like disillusionment seems almost inevitable. 

The remedy is to see it as part of the dis- 
cipline of life, and its purpose is to drive us to 
a deeper kind of faith. When a vision fails, it 
is because a truer and higher vision is possible. 
It is a call, not to renounce the ideal, but to 
make it nobler and larger. In spite of all the 
disasters that overtake idealism, it is the root 
of all human progress, in art and knowledge 
and social living. At our peril it is true we 
move to the lure of the Open Door, but at our 
greater peril we refuse it. Divine discontent- 
ment with what is, alone has saved the race 
from stagnation and death. The very illusive- 
ness of life is designed to tempt us on when we 
would give up. 

Much of the tragedy of life is that men give 



The Lure of the Open Door 153 

up so soon and relinquish the long seeking. 
We are content too easily with a state which 
rebukes us and with conditions which we know 
to be indefensible. Everywhere our broken 
purposes of good have withered before the 
fruitage. Everywhere work only begun or 
only half done taunts us with our futility. 
Better to have gone on and failed than to have 
turned aside in weakness or despair. We do 
not know when we might have made the great 
discovery or achieved the great task, if only we 
had gone on. We do not know at what turn 
of the road the gleaming towers of the City of 
God might have flashed on our eager eyes. 

Now I hear it not, but loiter 

Gaily as before. 

Tet sometimes I think, and thinking 

Makes the heart so sore — 

Just a few steps more 

And there might have dawned for me 

Blue and infinite, the sea. 



VII 
The Door of Opportunity 



Turning, for them who pass, the common dust 
Of servile opportunity to gold. 

— Wordsworth. 



VII 
THE DOOR OF OPPORTUNITY 




N" a Greek city many centuries 
ago there stood a statue, 
which was called Opportu- 
nity. The statue itself illus- 
trates the old lesson that op- 
portunity passes, for nothing remains of it, and 
only the inscription is left to tell us what it 
was like. The figure stood on its toes in the 
very act of departing, with wings on its feet. 
There was a large lock of hair on the forehead, 
while the head was bald at the back. The 
following conversation is supposed to take 
place between it and the passer-by : 
Statue, what is thy name ? 
I am called Opportunity. 
Who made thee ? 
Lysippus. 

Why standest thou on thy toes ? 
Because I stay but a moment. 
Why hast thou wings on thy feet ? 
i57 



158 The Open Door 

To show that I pass quickly. 

Why is thy hair long on thy forehead ? 

That men may seize me when they meet me. 

Why, then, is thy head so bald behind ? 

When I once have passed I cannot be caught. 

It is of course part of the world's most 
ancient wisdom that time is on the wing, and 
that opportunity stays but a moment. Among 
that ancient wisdom there is a sentence of Pliny 
the Elder, " It is a maxim universally agreed 
upon in agriculture that nothing must be done 
too late : and again that everything must be 
done at its proper season ; while there is a 
third precept which reminds us that opportu- 
nities lost can never be regained." 

There may not be much help for life in such 
wise saws, that in order to succeed a thing 
must not be done too soon, or too late, and yet 
must be done. We can take ourselves too seri- 
ously, though perhaps we cannot be too serious 
about life as a whole. It is a little like being 
told that the perfect golf stroke is made by 
hitting the middle of the ball with the middle 
of the club at the middle of the swing. The 
average man feels that these three things rarely 



The Door of Opportunity 159 

come together at the same time, and when 
they do it is by a happy fluke. If he gets too 
nervous about the perfect timing, he probably 
misses altogether. Some of the teaching about 
opportunity only results in making some of us 
nervous ; for we feel we have no chance with 
a flying figure of winged feet, whose single 
lock we must grasp on the hop. It only makes 
us irresolute to be told that our chance comes 
in a moment, and in a moment is gone. 

It would be easier if we knew what was 
opportunity. We cannot always recognize it 
when we see it, and we have not the advantage 
of being able to interrogate it and be sure of 
its name. It is easy to be wise after the event, 
and it is usually only after the event that we 
can see what was the very crisis of the busi- 
ness. We cannot afford to miss our opportuni- 
ties, and we do not know what are our oppor- 
tunities — that is the kind of fix in which life 
puts us. Things do not come labelled and 
named for our convenience, and it does not 
help much, except to engender vain regret, to 
be told that we missed the tide at its flood. 
There is a tragic way of speaking about oppor- 



i6o The Open D 



oor 



tunity as if it came to us once disguised, and 
then taunted us when we clawed vainly at the 
bald head, not having been alert enough to 
catch the hair on the forelock. 

The tendency of some of the teaching is to 
make some take very short views of life. The 
moral to them of the fact that time is on the 
wing is to snatch the day, and exhaust swiftly 
all the experiences and pleasures possible. 
Herrick's song, " To the Virgins to make much 
of Time," is in line with that moral, 

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, 
Old Time is still a-flying, 
And this same flower that smiles to-day 
To-morrow will be dying. 

Yet the copy-book moralists, who underline for 
us the phrase to watch and seize opportunity, 
would admit that this was a false application of 
the counsel. The short views of life, which 
sometimes seem so wise, are in the long run 
convicted of folly. The same copy-book moral- 
ists are largely to blame by interpreting op- 
portunity in such an external way. Life itself 
is our opportunity, and not just single incidents 
in it and single phases of it. The incidents and 



The Door of Opportunity 161 

the phases may obscure the whole, as we can 
fail to see the wood because of the trees. Life 
is short and art is long, but the art of life is 
also long, and the artist is not made nor marred 
in one trial. The learning and the mastery of 
his art will last him his life long. It is not true 
that everything is staked as on the cast of the 
dice. We can take comfort from the thought 
that even mistakes can be retrieved, and that 
opportunities are renewed, and life is very 
patient with her children. 

The false teaching is responsible for much 
unhappiness and for some despair. Hardly a 
day passes but we hear of men and women, 
sometimes even the young, giving up the un- 
equal struggle of life on account of some 
blunder or some disappointment. They lose 
heart because they think it irremediable, and 
believe that they have forfeited the one and 
only chance. Life has nothing further to offer 
them and the door is shut in their face. They 
collapse before the black thought that the true 
end has come, now that they have failed in the 
crisis. A business reverse, a disappointment in 



162 The Open Door 

love, a sudden weakness in the hour of tempta- 
tion, an unexpected defeat, a blight of ambi- 
tion, even a social gaucherie, will darken the 
whole world and convince them that all is lost. 
It is caused by a false perspective, and rightly- 
viewed some of the things that brought despair 
would be laughed at. A little humour, espe- 
cially the humour that sees the comedy of some 
of our tragedy, is a valuable quality to en- 
courage. All is not lost, even if that particular 
occasion be lost. The bald head of that flying 
figure can pass into space, but the rich proces- 
sion of life has not stopped. Other junctures 
emerge, and other occasions arise, and other 
doors open, and other opportunities offer. 

It is true that there are critical times in 
every life and points of special significance. 
Men sometimes look back and see where the 
tide turned, and where their venture was won 
or lost. Even so, they did not know it at the 
time, and only see it afterwards. The impor- 
tant thing is our attitude to life in general, and 
not how we met a special occasion. That was 
only part of the whole, and the general atti- 
tude to life settled the particular case. Much of 



The Door of Opportunity 163 

the importance of single steps is due to an illu- 
sion, caused by distance as we look back. Other 
and different steps would probably have taken 
us to pretty much the same place, being such 
persons as we are. Successful merchants love 
to recall the turning point of their career, and 
tell the world how the way they used the first 
thousand dollars which they earned settled 
everything. It is difficult for us to see how 
with their capacity for acquisition they could 
ever have failed to become what they are. 
Some of the lesser mortals who have not 
achieved such shining success never could 
follow in their footsteps, some because they 
would never want, others because they have 
a different conception of opportunity altogether. 
They may well refuse to be judged by that 
standard of success. 

It makes for courage and hope to realize that 
opportunity is not one thing that comes but 
once, to tantalize us with the vision of its bald 
head departing. We are never without op- 
portunities while we draw breath, and our 
biggest opportunity is our general view of life. 
If no man should presume on the assumption 



164 The Open Door 

that nothing matters one way or the other, 
no man need despair because he has missed 
chances which others have grasped. All is 
lost, only if hope be lost, and hope remains as 
life opens her doors and beckons us to enter. 
There is lavish supply for all the deep human 
needs, and our share awaits us. It only needs 
courage to face life manfully, and courage is 
but another name for faith — the primal faith 
that life is supremely worth while and is an 
arena for high thought and noble action. 
When he comes up to the House Beautiful lions 
growl and frighten the poor timid pilgrim, but 
when he takes heart of grace and comes right 
up, he sees that the lions are chained and the 
door is open with a gracious welcome. 

All the doors of the world are open to every 
son of man in his measure. All life's great 
things are cheap, to be had for the asking. 
Another man may own the land, but he cannot 
own the landscape — sometimes he is almost the 
only person who does not know that there is a 
landscape. I have known a man who spent 
lavishly on making a beautiful garden, which 



The Door of Opportunity 165 

was enjoyed by every one except himself. He 
merely did it, because it was the thing to do, 
and he had the wherewithal to do it. The 
beauty of earth and the glory of sky are there 
for all who have eyes to see. The pleasures of 
memory and imagination and affection can be 
indulged in by all. Flowers and birds and 
little children delight all who have the heart 
to enjoy. The strength of friendship and the 
joy of comradehood are not confined to the 
rich, indeed are rarely found there in their 
fairest flower. Even the limited democracy 
we now have has made it possible for most to 
enter into the joys opened by reading and 
music, and the greatest art of the world after 
all is open to the public, and all great artists 
have really worked for the public. Complete 
democracy when it comes will still further 
open wide all the doors into the richest possi- 
bilities of human life. 

It is the vision of that future which alone 
enlists the support of many high souls to all 
popular causes. There are conditions to-day 
born of the greed and selfishness and stupidity 
of men, which shut many of the doors of oppor- 



166 The Open Door 

trinity on the mass. There is a labour which 
brutalizes, though even then we cannot forget 
that there is an idleness and luxury which rot 
out the soul more surely than any hard lot of 
undue toil. The one is perdition, while the 
other is only deprivation. We do not forget 
that pathways to true opportunity are blocked 
to many jaded workers, and above all to many 
victims of our present muddled social state. 
Even some who are not classed with the " un- 
der dog " of modern industry are impoverished 
by the exacting nature of much modern busi- 
ness, and think themselves too tired by the 
strain of work to enter into the heritage of hu- 
man joy. But it is true that, even with things 
as they are, all of us have more open doors of 
real opportunity than we ever enter. Charles 
Lamb, who complained for himself of the dry 
drudgery at the desk's dead wood and declared 
that it was Sabbathless Satan who first in- 
vented work, cannot be said to have been de- 
prived of life's best chances. "We think of his 
rich nature, and happy friendships, and intel- 
lectual joys, and sweet spirit of sacrifice. 
When at last he was relieved from the bondage 



The Door of Opportunity 167 

of his office desk, he confessed he was at loose 
ends, and did not much enlarge his opportuni- 
ties for the deeper and higher life. 

Toil may be unsevered from tranquillity, and 
may only give zest to the pursuit of all that is 
best in the world. I once knew a Scottish me- 
chanic in a factory town who had so developed 
his interest in the flora and fauna of the district 
that what looked to me a common ditch weed 
told to him its beautiful story, so that every 
country walk he took was a source of unfailing 
delight. The copy-book moralists tell us to 
look out for opportunities, as if life were only 
a scramble in the great game of beggar-my- 
neighbour. Whatever happens to outward 
social conditions, it will always remain true 
that we must look in for our real opportunities. 
All life's great things are cheap, to be had by 
all who seek. We cannot buy love, nor sell it, 
though we try too often in our pitiful fashion. 
There is no purchase price for peace in the 
world's coin. We may pay for distractions 
and pleasures, but never for joy and lasting 
happiness. Nobody can shut and lock the door 
in our face. 



168 The Open Door 

There is a great opportunity before man in 
society to-day, created by causes too complex 
to trace in detail, by the fierce revolt of the 
dispossessed, by the general unrest of some 
classes, by the compunction of some of the 
favoured, and by the inspiring vision of re- 
ligion in some. "We are being forced to admit 
the failure of our civilization. We are com- 
pelled to open our eyes to some of the plague 
spots in our cities, and to acknowledge that 
there exist conditions that taint human life at 
its source. There is a cry for justice stronger 
than any appeal for charity has ever been. 
There is a demand for redress of wrongs and 
for the removal of the disabling conditions, that 
hamper the poor and that blight the young. 
The demand is that society must be so ordered 
that every one shall have a chance of realizing 
his self and living an unmaimed human life. 
There is much preventable pain, and consolable 
sorrow, and remediable wrong. There are 
many, among those who feel themselves en- 
tangled by the machinery of the present order, 
who would welcome any change that promises 
abatement of existing evil. 



The Door of Opportunity 169 

The social opportunity will not be adequately- 
met if we merely think of a material Utopia, a 
secular society whose sole ideal is an ample 
sufficiency of " bread and games." It would 
warrant Carlyle's taunt about the lubberland of 
bliss and the reformers who think only of a 
millennium of ease and never of a millennium of 
holiness. Man will never live, to be called 
living, by bread alone. There will remain 
immedicable pain, and sorrow that man cannot 
assuage, and hunger that earth cannot satisfy. 
There will still remain the visions of his high 
heart that can never be fulfilled on that material 
plane. Of course some may have an ideal of 
life which makes this seem absurd, and they 
cannot imagine what a man needs more than to 
be rich and increased with goods and have 
need of nothing ; and cannot see what more a 
bird needs than to have a gilded cage with 
hempseed plentiful and water sure. But that 
ideal has never yet sufficed for man, whatever 
it may be for canaries ! " What man knoweth 
the things of a man save the spirit of man which 
is in him ? " To know the things of a man you 
have to look below the smiling surface of cir- 



170 The Open Door 

cumstance ; and when you see below, it is as a 
soul in prison. 

We will miss some of our social opportunity 
if we fail to aim high enough, and think only 
of the economic side of life. There are times 
in history when we see that the world has lost 
some of its opportunity when in the spasm of 
change. The French Revolution, which took 
to devouring its own children, is a case in point. 
It disappointed its best friends, and though in 
some things it liberated man from bondage, in 
other things it fastened the chains more securely 
and hindered true freedom. Some of the ultra- 
conservatism imbedded in the Constitution and 
the institutions of the United States came from 
the dismay at the fundamental failure of the 
French Revolution. The world's redemption, 
which demands the frank and fearless change 
of social and industrial order, needs something 
more profound than only material reconstruc- 
tion. It needs enlightenment of conscience, 
and restoration of soul, and renewal of moral 
life. Mr. H. G. Wells says, perhaps with some 
sadness but certainly with great insight, " I 
recognize quite clearly that with people just as 



The Door of Opportunity 171 

they are with their prejudices, ignorances, 
misapprehensions, their unchecked vanities, 
greeds and jealousies, their crude and miscon- 
structed instincts, their irrational traditions, no 
Socialist state can exist, no better state can 
exist than the one you have now with all its 
squalor and cruelty." We ought not blindly to 
let ourselves suffer the certain disillusionment 
that must follow, if our thought of a new social 
order is only economic. 

This does not alter the fact that the oppor- 
tunity is before us, and the only point at issue 
is whether we will miss our chance of being 
pathfinders for the world. America has been 
so favoured that she might have tried out more 
fundamental experiments, instead of only 
duplicating the conditions and problems of the 
old world. "We have built our life on the same 
model, and the same difficulties confront us 
to-day — the same privileged classes, the same 
labour strife, the same social maladjustment, the 
same rampant individualism, the same city 
slums, and all the old brood. Already we are 
outdistanced by radical experiments elsewhere 
in social legislation. Static conditions all over 



172 The Open Door 

the world are breaking down, and new forces are 
at work. The only question is whether intellect 
and heart and spirit here will face the situation 
and reach the solution we need, or whether other 
instruments will be found. Other hands will 
stretch to the work ; other hearts will bend to 
the burden and be crowned by the glory. 
There are others ready when the nerveless 
hands let go their grip. It is well to bear this 
in mind in this our time of pride and of proba- 
tion as a nation. We are not essential. What 
is essential is that righteousness should be done, 
and that the highest interests of the world 
should be conserved and advanced. 

In Scotland years ago I used to look to 
America with her wonderful opportunities to 
solve some of the problems of life. She has 
done something to help on international peace, 
though nothing like so much as might have 
been expected with her historical and geo- 
graphical advantages. She has helped a little 
to break down some racial barriers, especially 
between the East and the West, though she 
has not lived up to one tithe of her own great 
profession, as is amply testified by the common 



The Door of Opportunity 173 

sentiment about the Japanese. But what has 
she done to protect the weak and the poor 
from corporate greed, and to put social and 
industrial life on a rational and just basis ? It 
is true that America has offered advantages to 
countless people to better their condition, but 
the chief credit is again geographical. "With a 
continent to exploit and the untold riches of a 
bountiful nature to gather, America might well 
be called the Country of Opportunity, but 
surely there is a higher kind of opportunity 
which was before her and still is hers — to 
work out a nobler type of life, and to build a 
juster state of society, and to bless the whole 
world with her polity. Many a time I have 
thrilled to the thought and the courage of the 
lines of an American poet, who has always 
been better appreciated in England than in his 
own country, 

Have the elder races halted ? 

Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over 

there beyond the seas ? 
We take up the task eternal and the burden and 

the lesson, 
Pioneers, O pioneers. 



174 The Open Door 

Are the pioneers themselves to halt, as the 
elder races with new courage address them- 
selves to the work ? Are the pioneers to be 
the first to weary, and to think they have ex- 
hausted opportunity by merely extracting the 
wealth of a virgin continent ? 

In our individual life also there come oppor- 
tunities, which we may miss because we have 
such false standards by which we judge things. 
We wait for the great event and for the great 
occasion, and we call that great which makes 
a big splash in the world. Or, when the trial 
comes we shrink from it through false modesty, 
saying to ourselves that some other more 
worthy instrument should be chosen. If our 
general attitude were right, we would see the 
meaning of all that is called opportunity. We 
are not alive to the gracious possibilities of the 
unregarded chances of every day. We need a 
more solemn sense of responsibility, a more 
serious view of the ever-constant junctures that 
occur. There is no great or small in life in 
view of the future. Who knoweth what is to 
turn out great or small to us ? Who knoweth 



The Door of Opportunity 175 

whether this seemingly trivial turning-point is 
not after all the very crisis of our fate ? Who 
knoweth whether this time when we are 
tempted to turn aside from the path of duty 
is not the very fruition of life for us, the one 
great golden opportunity which we barter for 
soulless ease or sell for a mess of pottage, or 
lose without even the pottage for a recom- 
pense ? 

That there are critical times in the lives of 
all we know, but we cannot easily put our 
finger on the point when we took time by the 
forelock and refused to let it go unblessed, or 
when we lost the occasion and must go to our 
graves the poorer for it. We cannot afford to 
miss our opportunities, and we cannot tell what 
are our opportunities. All life is our oppor- 
tunity. Every change, every discipline, every 
call of duty, every burden of responsibility, 
every leading of providence, every token of 
grace, every human relationship, every divine 
prompting, every voice of conscience, all these 
are open doors which lead out into the light. 
Life is poor and petty to many of us, a thing 
of routine : 



176 The Open Door 

The dull mechanic pacing to and fro. 
The set gray life, the apathetic end. 

We do not see the glory in the grayness. We 
miss the beauty in the dust, the music in the 
din, and fail to catch the great meaning of the 
whole. We do not see that the world can be- 
come to us one great revelation, and life one 
great opportunity for service. We think life 
mean and prosaic, when it is fraught with 
eternal consequences, and burdened with infi- 
nite possibilities. Fools and blind and slow of 
heart to believe, the whole world is vocal with 
music, life is fragrant with the divine, time is 
freighted with eternity, every human relation- 
ship recalls us to our higher relationship, every 
discipline is full to the brim of possible bless- 
ing, every loss carries a gain in its bosom, every 
duty is a privilege, every responsibility is an 
opportunity. It is our attitude to life in the 
mass that is important; for when we have 
that, the particular case will be met aright. 

For all of us in our measure the door of 
truth opens, which is something bigger than 
knowledge. Some doors of special knowledge 
are shut to many through circumstances. 



The Door of Opportunity 177 

They cannot expect to rival the opportunities 
of men who through leisure and training are 
scholars and investigators. But truth, though 
it is fed by knowledge, is something to be, 
rather than to know. It is more an ethical 
than a mental possession. We can cultivate 
intellectual veracity and moral courage, which 
will enable us to see and think straight, to act 
and will truly. We need this in affairs of 
church and state, in personal and social life. 

Among other things it helps to open the 
door also into peace. Peace of mind and con- 
science and heart depends largely on loyalty 
to truth. There is the peace of a good con- 
science which no one can pilfer from us, the 
peace that comes from a heart at rest. There 
are times when religion and ethics and the 
highest purpose of a man's life are seen, not 
as three different points of view, but as one. 
They are fused into one bright light. It is 
not in moments of mystic ecstasy or of subli- 
mated feeling that this is best seen, but when 
a man sees duty clear, and feels himself in line 
with the great power that controls the uni- 
verse. Such times we see in the life and work 



178 The Open Door 

of Abraham Lincoln. To the casual eye he 
often appeared a mere opportunist, and Amer- 
ican public opinion sometimes condemned him 
as such, but there was an inward consistence 
which saved him from ever being a time-server 
in any sense. He knew the purity of his pur- 
pose, and believed with all his soul that his 
purpose was somehow in keeping with the 
great power in the world that makes for 
righteousness. So he could speak quite simply 
and humbly yet confidently of being on the 
side of God. 

There is a door into love which is open to 
all. The secret is not to get love but to give 
it, to cultivate sympathy and a spirit of good- 
will. Nearly all the happiness of life comes 
through our relations with others, and if these 
are right our felicity is assured. We are bound 
up in a bundle of life and everything depends 
on how we accept our social intercourse. In 
the home life, in friendship, in the varied 
associations with others for all sorts of pur- 
poses, we find true satisfaction of our nature. 
Without this no personal success can avail. 
Failure in the one region of the family will 



The Door of Opportunity 179 

embitter and cloud the fairest prospect. This 
common source of happiness is independent of 
many other gifts of fortune ; indeed the most 
tragic failures arq often noted in circles of 
great wealth. In the groups also which com- 
pose social life, the associations with others in 
work and play, in the pursuit of common pur- 
poses whether intellectual or political or re- 
ligious, a right attitude is of immense impor- 
tance. Happiness is the fruit of our whole re- 
action to life, and the problem is not merely a 
bread and butter one. Much of our uneasiness 
and distress come from false relations with 
others, offenses against the spirit of good- will, 
failure to play our part rightly in social life. 
We alone can permanently and completely 
shut the door of opportunity against ourselves. 
For all of us also there stands a great and 
effectual door of service. Without this the 
way into love might be only a way into a 
subtle selfishness, which in the long run would 
defeat its end. The good-will that nowhere 
issues in service is mere sentimentalism. In 
the exercise of love, in the outflow of good-will, 
we find the source of our best joy. The reason 



180 The Open Door 

is not far to seek. Happiness comes from ac- 
tivity, the outgoing of energy, and is really 
not a matter of income but of output. Mere 
passive enjoyment passes very swiftly into the 
dreariest and deadliest weariness. Happiness 
is related to the purpose of a life, and the 
bigger the purpose the more chance for its 
permanence. This is why the pursuit of a 
great religious purpose that transcends personal 
ends fills a life with undiminishing joy. On 
every side lie opportunities to take our share 
of service, and to give some contribution to 
the world. No life is so humble, and no gifts 
so meagre, and no lot so narrow, that they do 
not afford play for the exercise of this ideal. 
A man is judged by his spirit, and the spirit 
is known by its fruits. The test of a life is 
its love, and love is measured by service. The 
door is open. 



VIII 
The Adventure of the Open Door 



Why should a man whose blood is warm within 
Sit like his grandsire cut in alabaster ? 

— Shakespeare. 




VIII 
THE ADVENTURE OF THE OPEN DOOR 

HEEE are some attractive fig- 
ures, who walk through life 
with the freedom and grace 
born of high courage. They 
keep to the end the fresh zest 
of living, meeting experience with a gay and 
even joyous air. They seem to be filled with 
love of life, and yet are without fear of death. 
They never seem to lose the sense of adventure, 
and they meet life as a Knight of chivalry 
sought danger to display his courage. The 
very precarious tenure by which life is held 
only seems to be a spur to put them on their 
mettle. The uncertainty of the future acts as 
a tonic, nerving them to joyful effort. The 
first early thrill of wonder at the strange beauty 
of the world is never deadened. They do not 
want to shirk all that is coming to them, and 
they take the hard knocks as smilingly as the 
successes. They are ready even to venture the 

183 



184 The Open Door 

? 

certain for the uncertain, like Shakespeare's 
schoolboy, who when he had lost one shaft 
shot another to find it, " and by adventuring 
both I oft found both." There may sometimes 
be a little of the gambler's spirit in this, but 
the gambler's spirit is only a true one perverted. 
Such debonair figures are too rarely seen; 
for most of us too soon lose the expectant air 
and forget the early rapture. The light passes 
too soon into dull commonplace ; and we travel 
little in the uplands. The sense of adventure 
is lost without regret ; for we prefer to play 
safe. The precarious tenure of our hold on life 
is a subject which we do not desire to think of 
more than we can help. "When we are com- 
pelled to consider it, we view it with a deep 
dismay, and are intimidated at the thought of 
the possible perils and nameless evils that may 
be met. We feel that the best plan is to move 
cautiously and avoid all needless risks. It is 
better to be safe than sorry. " There is a 
strong feeling in favour of cowardly and pru- 
dential proverbs," says Robert Louis Steven- 
son. "The sentiments of a man while he is 
full of ardour and hope are to be received, it is 



Adventure of the Open Door 185 

supposed, with some qualification. But when 
the same person has ignominiously failed and 
begins to eat up his words, he should be listened 
to like an oracle. Most of our pocket wisdom 
is conceived for the use of mediocre people, to 
discourage them from ambitious attempts, and 
generally console them in their mediocrity." 

Stevenson is himself a good illustration of 
the type, who look on life with adventurous 
eye. He had little use for what Whitman calls 
the literature of woe, and as little for the puling 
and whining at our lot or at our age. He was 
always ready to say a good word for life, and 
thought our little poets with their doleful music 
should be sent to look at the ploughman and 
learn wisdom. The common sources of human 
happiness remain, and the wonderful pageant 
of consciousness is richer than ever, and life de- 
serves to be faced with a brave vivacious note 
of courage. He proved his theory by his prac- 
tice, and bore out in life what he held in creed. 
It was not the breezy thoughtless optimism of 
the broad-chested squire who never knew the 
temptation to sickly sentimentalism. He did 
more than a man's work under disabilities of 



186 The Open Door 

physical weakness, sometimes of disabling pain, 
in exile far from many things he loved best, all 
without any pose as a martyr or a hero. He 
simply acted his own creed that it is better to 
live and be done with it, than to die daily in 
the sick-room. He preferred the brave and 
spirited termination to a miserly hoarding of 
the last few gasps. He fought with courage 
against hard odds, and gave some of his own 
brave cheer to others. Even if death were 
near, he thought that life would go down with 
better grace "foaming in full body over a 
precipice, than miserably straggling to an end 
in sandy deltas. " 

To take life with full confidence that it is 
worth while, to put the whole weight upon the 
assumption that it is worth while, to try that 
faith out to its conclusion, is what in essence 
we mean by the adventure of the Open Door. 
The real alternatives are not faith or unfaith — 
it is faith anyway. Another may if he likes 
put the weight of his life on the opposite as- 
sumption that what looks like meaning and 
value and purpose are only delusion. But that 



Adventure of the Open Door 187 

attitude is just as much faith as the other. 
There is no profound intellectual quality about 
that to warrant the superior air. As a fact it 
often means a craven refusal to take life at its 
highest pitch. It is just as much a venture of 
faith as the other, only it is faith in the value 
of the doubts and disillusions instead of the 
instincts and the first welcoming trust of the 
soul. The grace and truth and beauty and 
goodness of our experience are all supposed to 
be hiding some treachery for the man who is 
taken in by them. They will play him false, 
if he trusts them too blandly. 

Over against that faith, which seems born of 
spiritual fatigue, is the faith in the real value 
of life. It is however not something to be pas- 
sively accepted and enjoyed, but something to 
be achieved and attained, so that victory may 
be snatched even from the jaws of defeat. Life 
gives us back what we bring to it. It mirrors 
back to us the very attitude with which we 
approach it. There is no map of life with all 
its continents surveyed, and all its peaks scaled, 
and all its valleys measured, and all the shoals 
and depths of its seas sounded. That map will 



188 The Open Door 

never be made ; for it would only be possible if 
life were static — and then it would not be life. 
Thus, the true temper to meet it is in a spirit 
of adventure, not as a gamble, but believing in 
the worth of experience. 

This faith, like anything else, proves itself 
by being put to the test. The everlasting spirit 
of youth — das Ewigjungendliche — seems to suit 
the situation and to be at home among the 
facts. The world is so rich, with such infinite 
variety of scene and incident and appearance. 
It appeals to constant curiosity, and incites 
new interest on every hand. Life clothes itself 
in endless forms. The earth and sky and sea 
are full of marvels. The childish thought that 
" the world is so full of a number of things " 
becomes truer with ever increasing knowledge 
and experience. Anything may happen in such 
a universe. 

Human life too is rich with its wonderful 
procession of experience. Even for an observer 
of the cities and the ways of men there is 
spread out a drama and a spectacle such as 
never have been staged ; while for a partic- 
ipant, who knows himself an actor in the 



Adventure of the Open Door 189 

drama, there is no end of interest. The actors 
have no set pieces to speak and arranged scenes 
to fill, and have even many parts to play. In 
faithless moods men may sometimes say that 
there is nothing new under the sun, though we 
know as fact that there is nothing but the new. 
In prosaic moods we may say with Dr. 
Johnson that a blade of grass is always a blade 
of grass whether in one country or another, 
though we know that there are no two blades 
of grass alike even in the same field. Romance 
has not said 'farewell to the haunts of men. 
Life speaks to us with many voices, and not one 
of them without signification. It speaks to us 
in the world without and in the world within, 
by the infinitely little and the infinitely great. 
The human comedy appeals to laughter and 
tears, pity and pride ; and above all calls to us 
to be more than mere spectators. We too are 
in the play, and must make our part in it as it 
goes along unrehearsed. 

By faith the human mind makes its venture 
on the world for knowledge, and by faith the 
soul makes its venture on life. The true heart 
is not afraid to make either venture, and tastes 



190 The Open Door 

the relish of living. Last generation used to 
discuss solemnly and tragically the great ques- 
tion whether life is worth living, and wrote 
books and articles and poems on the theme. 
The only answer of any value was that of the 
wag, who replied that it all depended on the 
liver. The jaundiced eye will see everything 
blurred in a haze of yellow. The value of life 
will only be known by living, and the expe- 
riencing nature has at least all the chance there 
is. The temper therefore does not need justi- 
fication which accepts gleefully the adventure 
of the Open Door. Indeed herein lies the chief 
difference among men, in their attitude to new 
knowledge and deeper tracts of feeling and 
higher levels of experience. 

We pass it off as merely a matter of temper- 
ament, that one is constitutionally timid and 
another is by nature daring, that some are 
melancholy at the slightest excuse and others 
are sanguine. It is true that we cannot always 
control our moods and our feelings, any more 
than we can always control circumstances. 
We cannot live ever on one high plane. But 
we can cultivate even a mood, and can make it 



Adventure of the Open Door 191 

a habitude of mind. Still more when it is not 
a question of a mere mood, but of a central 
faith. Our life follows the fortunes of our 
faith, and one brave push of trust will lead 
out into large and spacious ways. The cow- 
ardly proverbs that are current, asking any- 
thing for a quiet life, are answered by the 
bolder sayings which tell us that if we never 
venture we can never win. They wave the 
flag of adventure in the eyes of youth, and at 
least suggest a better ideal than the world's 
stale wisdom of stodgy respectability and cau- 
tious prudence. 

What qualities should mark this attitude of 
adventure towards life and especially towards 
new experience ? In deference to the world's 
rather sad wisdom, we will begin by saying 
that it should be marked by seriousness, though 
perhaps the solemn tone is more natural to the 
spectator than to the actor. When we move 
in a new direction meeting the future in un- 
tried ways, the uncertainty makes us serious, 
or at any rate makes our well-wishers serious. 
When the lad who has grown in thoughtless 



192 The Open Door 

serenity under the shelter of the home leaves 
it to build up his own life after his own design, 
it is an anxious time for all who love him. 
Many a tragic story gives ground for the anx- 
iety. The novelty of the new manner of life 
may enchant the youthful mind, and he may 
meet the future in gay unconcern or even with 
eager greeting. He is going to learn some- 
thing of the world and its ways. New faces 
have their attraction, and fresh scenes their 
fascination. The past is forgotten in the ardent 
longing for the future, and the present is the 
disagreeable interval which keeps him from 
the golden joys beyond. To walk along an 
untrodden path, to try what unknown fortune 
has in store, to reach out towards a new ad- 
venture, to fill the life with unfelt experiences 
— such prospect charms the heart of youth. 
Youth would take the plunge gaily, would 
dash through the river anyhow into the Prom- 
ised Land. Time goes too slowly to suit the 
vaulting thoughts of youth. It creeps; it 
crawls; it has no hot blood in its sluggish 
veins. Youth does not like the space which 
is put between it and the Promised Land, a 



Adventure of the Open Door 193 

tantalizing distance to a heart impatient with 
desire. 

We do not live very long till we come to see 
the value of a breathing-space. After a little 
we do not court the future so rapturously. 
We are even glad of every chance we can get 
to know something of the way by which we 
must go. We may not fear the unknown, but 
our welcome of it is not so boisterous. We 
learn that a new opportunity is a new respon- 
sibility. The future no longer thrills us with 
desire, but calms us with solemnity. A new 
enterprise is not to be entered on lightly. 
There is much in it to make us serious, how- 
ever much there may be to make us expectant. 
The Promised Land will have its dangers as 
well as the Desert. The future will have its 
trials and sorrows as well as the past. It is 
well that a little of the Present which bridges 
the gulf between the Past and the Future 
should be given to serious consideration. 

The same is true, only on a larger scale, in 
the history of nations as of men. Many a time 
a nation has entered on great changes light- 
heartedly, which have killed its best sons in 



194 The Open Door 

the effort to undo the evil ; or it has embarked 
on great schemes without counting the cost, 
and the cost has been its own national exist- 
ence ; or it has begun with hallelujahs a war 
which has ended with wails. A great nation 
must have learned seriousness, must not play 
with destiny ; and while not afraid of any new 
undertaking to which it is called meets it 
calmly and thoughtfully, knowing it to be 
fraught with danger. We make our own his- 
tory as nations and as men. We also make 
our own destiny. The true reading of history 
and of destiny does not consist of the events 
that have happened and will happen, but of 
the manner in which they are met, the spirit 
which pervades the meeting of them, the re- 
sults they produce on character and life. 

The seriousness, however, ought not to be al- 
lowed to rob us of resolution, but should only 
brace us to a firmer courage. Of course an ex- 
periment has elements of doubt, and nobody 
knows how a thing will work till it has been 
tried. The man who never made a mistake 
never made anything. The society that never 



Adventure of the Open Door 195 

dared anything never did anything. We can 
tail along living off the experiences and the 
venturesome experiments of others, but if we 
lost nothing else we would lose the thrill of the 
wonder and the joy of discovery. The brass 
band may not be the whole procession, but at 
least they usually get more out of it than their 
tame followers. Adventure is the true scien- 
tific attitude towards life ; for science only ad- 
vances by experiment. It is true that there 
are risks, but because a chemist will sometimes 
blow himself up by a novel chemical composi- 
tion does not stop experiments in chemistry. 
An experiment in social life may also go wrong 
by a wrong mixture of ingredients, but if we 
could not learn from our mistakes we could not 
learn at all. Any open door into the unknown 
is adventure, and adventure asks for courage. 
We will never know how anything will work 
until we put it to the test. Mankind is held 
in ancient grooves often through cowardice. 
Work passes into drudgery, because the dull 
mind does not see its broadening relations to 
the whole of man's life. Art grows sterile for 
lack of the creative spirit that will not be con- 



196 The Open Door 

tent with repetitions. Religion becomes con- 
vention, and instead of being never-ending in- 
spiration imprisons the soul in routine. 

If the adventure of life calls for seriousness 
and courage, it demands above all decision. 
We let our chances pass through sheer irreso- 
lution. We cannot make up our minds, and 
this is not always a sign of cowardice, nor al- 
ways a mark of levity. However it comes, it 
explains much of the futility of life to most of 
us. The same parts are played over again with 
painful iteration on every stage of human his- 
tory. Every attempt at reform, social, polit- 
ical, and religious, makes the same lines of 
cleavage. On the one side there is the passion 
of reform, and on the other side the passion of 
opposition ; and in between the colourless im- 
mobile mass that are neither for nor against, 
and can be either. On every question, at every 
crisis, there are the ineffective, those who halt, 
are lame on both sides, and are of use to none, 
at least so far as active support is concerned. 
And it is not confined to great questions that 
only emerge at intervals. We see this temper 



Adventure of the Open Door 197 

of indecision every day coming out in the char- 
acters of men, in a feckless inconclusiveness of 
life, meaning nothing in particular, seeing noth- 
ing clearly, from childhood to old age unre- 
solved about the most serious things of life, 
always at a loss what to make of it when any 
occasion for choice occurs. 

This infirmity of purpose, this irresolute halt- 
ing ever between two opinions, is perhaps the 
most pernicious flaw of character possible, mak- 
ing the whole life futile. The faults open to 
the warm-blooded generous nature are serious 
enough, but for abiding mischief are not to be 
compared to the calculating selfishness which 
is ever tremulous to be on the strong side, or 
the weak vacillation revealing a grain of nature 
on which a fine character cannot possibly be 
cut. You can make nothing of mere negation. 
A ship can sail against wind and tide ; but a 
log is as the surf of the sea itself, driven with 
the wind and tossed. A man of undecisive 
character loses what vital force he has, and is 
at the mercy of any outside influence that 
touches him. John Foster in his Essay on De- 
cision of Character describes this helplessness 



198 The Open Door 

with his own fine keen quality of style, "A 
man without decision belongs to whatever can 
capture him ; and one thing after another vin- 
dicates its right to him, by arresting him while 
he is trying to go on ; as twigs and chips, float- 
ing near the edge of a river, are intercepted 
by every weed, and whirled in every little 
eddy." 

This again we put down to temperament, our 
common refuge to-day from every burden of 
responsibility. There is much in temperament ; 
and what is easy conquest to one is to another 
arduous toil. But not thus can we pass away 
from the subject of decision, and the opportu- 
nities which present themselves to us. That is 
to submit to be victims, and not the masters of 
our fate. Here as elsewhere our conduct affects 
our character, and indeed makes it, so far as we 
have the making of it in our own hands. A 
mean mind is made so by constant meannesses. 
A foul mind feeds itself on foulness. A selfish 
life becomes so by selfishness. A generous 
heart grows large by the exercise of itself. A 
strong character attains strength by continual 
decisions ; as a child learns to walk by walking. 



Adventure of the Open D oor 199 

Nay, for the final cause of want of determina- 
tion, and halting between two opinions, we 
must look to a deeper source than the excuse 
of temperament. 

Indecision seems a special temptation of this 
age ; since scientific method has affected all our 
thinking. Science demands proof, and is willing 
to wait any length of time for proof. There 
are some subjects about which the true attitude 
is one of balance of judgment. From the great 
increase of knowledge in our time we have got 
accustomed to holding our minds in suspense. 
So much depends on research and slow proc- 
esses of discovery. Even on the subject of 
religion there are many things which do not 
press for an immediate decision. Many ques- 
tions of creed and worship and church govern- 
ment, which so divide the Church, can stand. 
A man is quite within his rights if he suspends 
judgment on many questions both of scholar- 
ship and of theology, when no spiritual issue 
depends on them. But this legitimate and even 
necessary indecision has affected the greater 
matters of the law ; and we have even an 
affectation of indecision, which is supposed to 



2oo The Open Door 

be the correct and scientific attitude about both 
religion and life. Indeed we seem to be in a 
period of indifference, in politics and literature, 
and religion, and all the things about which 
men used to feel intensely. Enthusiasm is 
discounted amongst us ; passion is despised ; 
and the ideal seems to a languid tolerance, 
which plays at great realities, and which will 
neither assert nor deny. Such an attitude if 
persisted in is the ruin of all character, and an 
end to all true dignity of life. A lower depth 
than blatant unfaith is the moral apathy that 
makes light of distinctions. 

The clue out of the difficulties about the 
things on which it is wise to exercise suspense 
of judgment is a simple one. There is always 
need for caution in things of intellect ; but it is 
fatal policy in things of conscience. This is 
why religion demands decision, and gets it, 
whether we consciously decide or not ; for it is 
in the first instance not a matter of intellectual 
conviction, but of moral will. It is not specu- 
lation, which can wait : it is life. All men 
mean to face up to the great questions of life 
before they die. But meantime there are things 



Adventure of the Open Door 201 

of primary importance which they will secure 
first, and afterwards they will think of the 
other, when they have leisure and security of 
tenure. Men dream of a time when things will 
be easier for them, when the strain will be re- 
lieved, and they can get breathing-space to come 
to some definite decisions. As they are securing 
the means of living, life itself is slipping away 
from them. Those who halt, standing first on 
one foot and then on the other, do not really 
count in the game. The trimmers, the sitters 
on fences, the spectators do not count. The 
greatest question ever asked of man was, What 
shall it profit to gain the whole world and lose 
the soul ? But men are everywhere losing the 
soul and not even getting the world. It is 
worse than tragedy, it is farce ! 

There are great things to be done in life, 
great decisions to be made, a great adventure to 
follow. Surely the poorest fate is to let judg- 
ment go against us by default. The way of 
courage is the way of faith, which declares for 
the worth of all human experience, which accepts 
a divine purpose, and is willing to stake all on 



202 The Open Door 

the hazard. There are two points in the adven- 
ture of the diver, 

One — when, a beggar, he prepares to plunge 
One — when, a prince, he rises with his pearl. 

To stand shivering on the brink of the great 
human experiences, to let doubt unnerve or fear 
daunt us, so that we refuse to cherish man's 
noblest hopes would be as futile as a diver who 
would never make a plunge. If we believe 
that life has pearls of truth and beauty and 
love and goodness, it is the part of wisdom to 
seek them. We will at least know the thrill of 
the adventure of the diver as we plunge. 



IX 



The Last Open Door 



Now I saw in my dream that these two men went in 
at the gate : and lo, as they entered, they were trans- 
figured. 

— Bunyan. 




IX 
THE LAST OPEN DOOR 

HAT have we to say about the 
last open door which stands 
for all men? Have we the 
same right to approach it 
with hope and expectancy? 
Does it too spell opportunity for the enlarge- 
ment of life? It certainly differs from some 
others in this, that there is no choice given us, 
but we must enter whether we will or not. 
We are not offered an alternative ; we are not 
asked whether we will consent to die. There 
are, however, alternatives as to how we meet 
it, and as to what it means for life. We may 
view it as a door leading to the end of all 
things, or as a new beginning. We may think 
of it with dread and unspeakable fear, or it 
may inspire in us hope. The thought of it 
may be like a death's head at the feast, spoil- 
ing the present, and weakening the future when 
it does come. Or the thought may bring peace, 

if not eager expectation. 

205 



206 The Open Door 

It is natural to associate fear with death, 
which has been ever the background of life. 
When we look steadily at life we always see 
it against that background. Men are often 
able to forget it and are able sometimes to 
neglect it, simply leaving it out of account, 
but not forever. Sooner or later we come 
close to it and are compelled to consider it. 
Some day in the sunshine we are shocked with 
the sudden news of calamity. Somewhere in 
the music there sounds the deep tragic note. 
The first natural reaction is a shrinking as from 
a ruthless foe. A French writer says, " They 
call me a master because of some magic in my 
speech and thoughts, but I am a frightened 
child in the presence of death." 

"We may refuse to think of it, but one day 
we stand beside an open door, and the question 
again forces itself on us. We read and hear 
daily of catastrophes which are far off and do 
not touch us closely, until at last it comes so 
near that it touches us on our flesh and pierces 
to the quick. Even then we count on our own 
luck, and get back into life, shaking it off like 
a nightmare. But however delayed is the 



The Last Open Door 207 

personal problem, we know that at last we too 
must reach the place where we look out into the 
dark, and only one open door remains, which no 
human skill or art can avoid. All other ways 
are blocked, and when we pass through, the 
door is shut behind us which no man openeth. 

The greatest fact of life is the fact of death. 
Yet on a surface view nothing seems to have 
less influence on actual conduct. We make 
our plans and lay out our projects without 
taking it into account. We go from a funeral 
to a feast without sense of incongruity. We 
transact our business on the assumption that 
we will be on the premises to-morrow or next 
week or next year. At the back of our head 
is the knowledge that at any moment it may 
be our turn to be singled out, but that possi- 
bility is never allowed to affect this day's pro- 
ceedings. 

Some small moralists have denounced us for 
levity or high-handed defiance because of this. 
But this common trait of human life justifies 
itself. It is not merely that life must go on, 
and the needs of life remain ; but also it is 



2o8 "The Open D 



oor 



true natural philosophy. Endless precautions 
about contingencies, constant presentiments of 
possible evil would simply cut the nerve of 
living. In self-defense, if nothing else, man 
must walk boldly and attend to the affairs of 
life. All the more if life is to us an open door 
of opportunity and is a glorious adventure, the 
fit and proper attitude is the brave carriage 
that makes light of odds. Prudence alone 
would leave us a pretty dismal world. 

At the same time the fact taken by itself 
does not do justice to the whole situation. It 
is merely a surface view, and we cannot as- 
sume that death has no real influence on men 
and that therefore we need take no account of 
it in our complete view. Death is always 
there as the background of life. It colours the 
whole environment. That is why our attitude 
to it is so important. In the long run what 
we have to say about it will determine even 
conduct. Death is the greatest adventure in 
life, and to have faced it and settled how it 
must be met is the largest part of our total 
attitude. A good deal of the ostentatious neg- 
lect of the subject in ordinary life is really 



The Last Open Door 209 

due to the distaste and fear men really have 
for it. It is not brazen defiance and high- 
handed impiety that makes men go on as if 
there were no such thing as death. It is often 
the shrinking from even thinking of a fact 
which causes fear and disgust. Because of 
this life is really weakened and maimed. 

Part of the dread comes from false associa- 
tions. We have never looked death squarely 
in the face and made up our minds as to what 
it actually means for us. Our evasion causes 
the whole subject to be disguised, so that we 
never see it robbed of its adventitious associa- 
tions. We confuse the event itself with the 
manner of its happening. Many when they 
think of death think of it as the last agony, 
which is like thinking of life only in terms 
of the circumstances of birth. Or death is 
pictured as a ghastly figure with the horrid 
shears who slits the thin-spun life, a weird and 
horrid something that puts an end to life. It 
is associated with suffering and memories of 
irremediable loss. The imagination morbidly 
plays round the scenery of the act. Further, 



2i o The Open Door 

the future after death is thought of as blank 
homeless darkness, or as the cold horror of the 
grave. It is a step into the abyss with name- 
less unimaginable evils, or thought fastens on 
the gruesome processes that disintegrate the 
body of clay. 

Our common ways of depicting death daunt 
our courage, so that we never see the fact truth- 
fully. It is no wonder that the whole question 
is tabooed as much as possible and dismissed 
from consideration ; nor is it wonder that when 
it must be noted it causes a shudder of distaste 
and a panic of fear. These common associations 
have no essential place in the real meaning of 
the event. The subject is also confused by the 
age-old questions it raises. We may ask in- 
soluble questions here as elsewhere, but we are 
not called to answer them. We can assume a 
definite attitude to life without being able to 
solve all or any of its enigmas. Indeed the 
thing of chief importance is our general atti- 
tude, and not our failure to answer the ques- 
tions. So here the chief thing is our attitude, 
which does not depend on how we attempt to 
explain the final problems raised by death. 



The Last Open Door 211 

The first fact about the last open door is that 
through it we are ushered into the unknown. 
All our futile speculations, and crude theories, 
and pictures of prosaic imagination, and detailed 
faiths, and denials, leave us precisely as we 
were. As before, we are still facing the un- 
known. We know no more about the future 
after death than the unborn babe knows of the 
future after birth. The great inevitable expe- 
rience is an experience of the unknown. This 
is the chief fact about death, and not the 
accidental associations with which we usually 
clothe it. If then this is the one important 
fact, how it will affect us when we calmly con- 
sider it is settled by our usual attitude towards 
the unknown. If we have learned to dread 
the unknown, if we have given up the long 
passion of man and turned back from his 
endless search, if we have let life harden 
down to custom and contentment with the 
usual, we can only view such a radical ven- 
ture with alarm and dismay. A desperate 
plunge into the depths of the unknown brings 
a shudder at the very thought. We cannot 
conceive of ourselves even for one moment 



212 The Open Door 

treasuring a mood which could let us greet the 
unseen with a cheer. When life itself never 
attracts us as an adventure, we can only be 
appalled at the adventure of death. 

But if the unknown is welcomed rather than 
dreaded, if the lesson of the Open Door has 
been taken to heart by us, the thought of some 
further unknown does not in itself bring dis- 
tress. The real distress does not lie for us 
there at all, but in the breaches it creates in 
love and fellowship, in the wounds of affection, 
the end it brings to other hopes and ambitions. 
The sore distress of death has to do with the 
old life and with the breaking up of the known. 
As for the new unknown with which it comes, 
that has no terrors for the man who courts the 
unknown. It may be even viewed as the 
beginning of a new and glorious adventure. It 
sets wide an entrance into a way where we 
have not passed heretofore. The one solemn 
fact is that we can return henceforth no more 
that way. The bridges are burned. 

Death, as we know it, exists for life. One 
of the arguments for death in the world as we 
see it is to make room for life, and to keep life 



The Last Open Door 213 

from the static, which would be death in life. 
Even in the region of man's common en- 
deavours we sometimes say that progress will 
only come when we have had a few first class 
funerals. That of course only means that we 
see some value in death for the sake of other 
life. May we not go further and believe that 
there may be meaning and value in death for 
the life itself that dies? An end in time is 
nothing in human life. It is the end in purpose 
that really counts. If the end in purpose is that 
man should reach ever higher results in char- 
acter and in all that makes him man, we may 
well believe that in every sense death exists for 
life. 

This leads us to what may sound like a para- 
dox that life exists for death. The end crowns 
the work. Without the further experience 
that we call death, the previous experience of 
life would be aimless and wasted. Men 
through religious faith have been able to view 
death with tranquil eyes, because it was to 
them the gate into larger life. It is the ves- 
tibule of the House of "Many Mansions. But 
meanwhile, without dealing with that larger 



214 The Open Door 

and richer faith, we can say that even from 
the point of view of an inevitable adventure, 
death may lose some of its terrors, which are 
really the terrors only of the unknown. We 
judge a thing by what it leads up to. It is 
foolish to judge a process by its beginning. A 
consideration of origins will never give the 
value of an evolving force. So the thing of 
importance is not where life came from, but 
where it issues. The value of life is that it is 
the only road, which leads to the open door of 
the new mystery. We need life, that it may 
usher us to death as to another birth. 

Is this too high a note ? If we can strike 
it and hold it, one effect at any rate will be 
to weaken the fear with which death grips us. 
Even speaking of death, as we have hitherto 
been doing, as merely the unknown, without 
the light of faith on it or the special colour of 
hope, the king of terrors loses some of his ter- 
rifying aspect. As part of the whole adven- 
ture of man, it should be met, and can be met, 
in the same temper as the rest. Death ought 
to be viewed exactly as life itself is viewed. 



The hast Open Door 215 

We do not know what lies ahead. That is its 
charm and its lure, unless we are craven and 
give up in the presence of any unknown. The 
universe has not exhausted, and never can ex- 
haust, its experiments ; and life has not made 
an end of its experiences. This last open door 
comes to us with the same lure as any other, 
and it ought not to stop our breath with dismay. 
If we carry also our fundamental faith in 
life and apply it here, we are only doing what 
is our right. True we cannot answer the in- 
soluble questions which we ourselves raise, bat 
even answering the questions would not be 
the same thing as living through them. Here 
in death as in the rest of life, it is enough to 
stake our all on the only intelligent hazard 
that the world means something and that 
something good. It becomes more and more 
incredible that the universe is casual, some- 
thing that has just happened. All science 
builds on the assumption that the cosmic order 
is rational, and in practice science agrees with 
Darwin's judgment that if we consider the 
whole universe the mind refuses to look at it 
as the outcome of chance. It is incredible that 



216 The Open Door 

the universe is diabolic. It might be non- 
moral, caring neither the one way nor the 
other for what we call goodness and righteous- 
ness and truth, but that it can be evilly dis- 
posed is incredible. If we can say that the 
universe may be unmoral and cares not for 
what man calls good, it must be because 
it cares for something bigger, a good higher 
than our poor conception of it. It is incred- 
ible that it could have for its end something 
less than its own creature. " I will not be- 
lieve," says Sir Oliver Lodge, " that it is given 
to man to have thoughts nobler and loftier 
than the real truth of things." If this is our 
fundamental faith in life, it must remain our 
faith in what is the universal experience of life 
which we call death. We stake our all on the 
only intelligent hazard we know, namely, that 
it too has at its heart the highest purpose. 

If so we can meet the great adventure with 
calm courage, if not with glad amaze. We 
can carry life through to its end in a temper 
finer than any stoical endurance. There is 
something heartening about any kind of cour- 
age, even the courage which would rather " die 



The Last Open Door 217 

game " than go to pieces in weakness. Steven- 
son in his essay JEs Triplex strikes this virile 
note when he declares that even if death catch 
people like an open pitfall in mid career as 
they are laying out vast projects, there is some- 
thing brave and spirited in such a termination. 
" When the Greeks made their fine saying that 
those whom the gods love die young, I cannot 
help believing they had this sort of death also 
in their eye. For surely, at whatever age it 
overtakes the man, this is to die young. Death 
has not been suffered to take so much as an 
illusion from his heart. In the hot-fit of life, 
a-tiptoe on the highest point of being, he passes 
at a bound on the other side. The noise of the 
mallet and chisel is scarcely quenched, the 
trumpets are hardly done blowing, when, 
trailing with him clouds of glory, this happy- 
starred, full-blooded spirit shoots into the spir- 
itual land." 

When the courage has deeper roots in faith, 
it comes to even finer flower. When the 
happy-starred full-blooded spirit builds his life 
on a world, where he feels sure that the highest 



218 The Open D 



oor 



spiritual values cannot perish, where he believes 
that the things he counts most precious are 
precious to God, he makes not only great dying 
but great living. This faith is the seed-plot of 
immortality. It ceases to be mere hypothesis ; 
for it has the verification of actual test. It 
works in life, creating the greatest thing which 
we know on earth, personality / producing the 
most permanent thing of which we have ex- 
perience, character / and giving authority to the 
highest purpose to which we bow, the service 
that can even command sacrifice. The faith 
confirms itself by its results, as the tree is 
known by its fruits. The essence of the Chris- 
tian position is that human life is the fruit of 
purpose, and that it is a purpose of love, a pur- 
pose to redeem. Standing on that we find 
courage, and know peace, and have a foretaste 
even of joy. We can believe that the future 
will only contain what eye hath not seen, nor 
ear heard, and what it hath not entered into 
the heart of man to conceive. 

The belief that the last adventure has an 
issue may find support in many quarters, but 
has its real seat in a living faith in spiritual 



The Last Open Door 219 

values. It does not depend on scientific doc- 
trines and lines of proof and scientific analogies. 
It does not rest on philosophical arguments, 
such as the fact of personality ; nor does it hang 
on moral arguments, such as the passion for 
justice which lies deep in the hot heart of man ; 
nor does it trust to any or all of the facts of 
life which call for a future. All that scientific 
arguments can do is to show that there is no 
abstract impossibility of the soul surviving the 
shock of bodily death. All that the other ar- 
guments do is to make immortality reasonable, 
or desirable, or probable. But it really rests 
on the facts of the spiritual life, facts which 
have made the faith universal, and have made 
it persist through all the crises of doubt and 
denial. Men attained it by a necessity of their 
moral and spiritual history, and cannot give it 
up without giving up all their past and all their 
future. 

We do not know the real truth of things, 
but we can without difficulty affirm that our 
thoughts cannot be nobler and loftier than 
the real truth itself. We can easily conceive 
that the real truth is vastly different from our 



220 The Open Door 

petty conceptions, but not that it is grossly in- 
ferior. We throw ourselves on that assurance 
with courage and hope. Whatever the real 
truth is, however it transcends expectation, it 
is not only better than our poor imagining — it 
is the best ! Before the last open door, as be- 
fore any other we have known, we are sure 
that the fact is more wonderful than our 
thought of it. In this attitude we trust life, 
and in it we trust death. For lack of this we 
are weak where we might be strong, and timid 
where courage should inspire us. It is not be- 
fore death alone that we find men waver and 
falter. There are possibly more people afflicted 
by the fear of life than by any fear of death. 
They are oppressed by the dread of nameless 
ills, full of anxiety about the future, dismayed 
before any prospect of change. Indeed often 
we find men so tired of life, so afraid of its pos- 
sibilities, that they lose all fear of the last great 
enemy and welcome it as a happy release. The 
last adventure is only the last of a series, and 
it can be met in the same spirit as the rest. If 
we have learned to trust life, we can trust its 
future issue. 



The Last Open Door 221 

Everything therefore depends on our funda- 
mental faith. This may be something other 
than the items of our professed creed. It 
means the things by which we are really liv- 
ing, and represents the solid ground on which 
we stand. It is not a metaphysical statement 
of our belief, but our practical outlook on life. 
Our faith can be known and tested by what we 
actually believe about ourselves as easily as by 
what we believe about the world and God. 
This at least can be said with certainty that 
man cannot be merely the child of time if he 
stands to God in the relation which Jesus as- 
serted. We come to faith in a future life, not 
by a process of reasoning on so-called scientific 
analogies, but by accepting that relation. 

This further narrows the question down to 
our view of the essential features of human 
nature. If we have a mean conception of our 
own real nature, we can also deny a future 
life. These two subjects are sides of the same 
thing. The absolutely convincing ground of 
our great faith is that we accept ourselves at 
our highest, when we feel it to be natural and 
inevitable that the eternal within us should 



222 The Open Door 

claim kinship with the eternal outside us. If 
in spite of appearing to be, in Hamlet's words, 
noble in reason and infinite in faculty, this 
paragon of animal be but a quintessence of 
dust, if all our moral and spiritual intuitions 
be but foolish dreams and all our moral and 
spiritual history be a vain imagination, then 
we can calmly acquiesce in the doom of anni- 
hilation. Nothing else is fit for such a futile 
and petty being. But if we accept the essen- 
tial dignity of human nature in spite of all the 
flaws and sins, we are compelled to believe in 
eternal life. It is the only adequate sphere for 
such powers and capacities as man possesses. 
The very flaws and imperfections become 
prophecies of a true and full realization. 

Man the spirit, with his aspirations and ideals 
and deep feelings and fluttering hopes and all 
the high possibilities of character and intellect 
and holiness, cannot die. Did the world after 
great travail make us what we are, touching us 
to infinite longings after knowledge, after 
progress, after love, after beauty, move us 
even with hunger and thirst after righteous- 
ness — only to mock us at the last ? Does life 



The Last Open Door 223 

take a man, endowing him with inchoate 
capacities, opening vistas of thought and 
wonder, giving him memory and imagination, 
planting in him keenest sensibilities and death- 
less hopes, lighting his torch from the light of 
eternal truth, quickening in him high thoughts 
and noble passions, dowering his heart with 
the love of love itself, luring him with visions 
of perfect spiritual communion — only to plunge 
him at the last in extinction, as a candle gutters 
itself out in an empty socket ? After the age- 
long progress and the long story which we 
dimly trace, we cannot believe that it will go for 
nothing and be swept over like a child's house 
of cards. If there be no goodness at the heart 
of the universe, it is hard to see how anything 
we can call goodness could have arisen in man. 

The general attitude to life, suggested by 
the figure of the Open Door, is plain. Of all 
the needs of man the biggest need is that he 
should be sure that there is a place for him in 
God's purpose, that there is a sphere of service 
for his life, and meaning in all that he is and 
does. With this he has not only a dignified 



224 The Open Door 

present but also a sure future. He is nowhere 
being led into a blind alley. Without this as- 
sured hope, life at any time can become mean- 
ingless, cut off with its ragged edge left. Our 
poor little lives need to be related to the 
great life of the world, and our petty personal 
purposes need to be related to a great purpose. 
The greatest purpose we know, both for our 
personal character and for our social future, is 
summed up in the ideal the Kingdom of God, 
as it filled the heart of our Master. The door 
into that Kingdom is open to every son and 
daughter of man. To make submission of 
heart and life here is the demand of religion, 
and the result is enlargement beyond all ex- 
pectation. Men sometimes have thought of re- 
ligion as something to be gained at long last 
and at great cost. They have thought that 
they might squeeze through a door at the end 
and enter in with the gasp of a struggling soul, 
falling prostrate at the threshold. All the 
time the door stands open wide, into liberty 
and love and peace and truth, and a great and 
effectual door of service. 

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